On this basis the Prime Minister and I, and our respective governments, have committed to work further together to impress on Europe this greater growth orientation.

Primo Ministro Finlandese Katainen

Mr. Prime Minister thank you very much for your time, it has been a pleasure to visit Italy and you personally. It is always very useful to have some time on a bilateral basis and to go deeper into European and economic issues. Even if we know our countries quite well, sometimes it is really important to talk and learn from each other and from each other’s thinking.

Italy has done a good job, excellent job, in order to bring the deficit down, in order to take a firm grip on a (stronger) development, in order to strengthen market confidence market and the measures already decided to cut the budget deficit or raise taxes and reform market structures will enable future growth. And this is not just my personal opinion; I know a lot of our colleagues share it very widely and we have also seen that in the first part of this year the market rates have come down because they have seen that Italy, the new government of Italy, is doing the right things, even though they are really really hard for everybody.

Regarding the European issues, there are a lot of things which we share very, very closely, for instance, how we should or could create growth within the EU. One of the key issues is that we have to take care of the single market, because the single market is something which is the core of the EU and it is also a starting point for economy growth for small and medium size businesses.

Finland has traditionally been an industrial country and we are taking care of the competitiveness of our industrial sector, but at the same time we are putting more and more emphasis on small and medium size companies. This is especially the case for innovation and startups, which need a good growth and for that we need a better single market and there we have very similar views with the Prime Minister and with Italy on this issue. Like Prime Minister Monti already said we want to encourage the European institutions to make concrete proposals in order to get a wider and more deeply integrated single market.