Strategies of the Development of Entrepreneurship and SME

cooperation with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe prepared a Questionnairein order to review the impacts of the declaration on the development of the entrepreneurshipand SMEs sector. 11 The intention was to discuss the review document in the future at theMeeting of the WG on SMEs. Unfortunately the UNECE was not able to evaluate theimplementation of the Declaration due to bad attitude and lack of response of the BSECMember States. Only Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Montenegro alone, Turkey and Ukrainefulfilled their obligation. It is very sad, because without evaluation of the implementation of thisimportant document PERMIS BSEC and the WG on SMEs could not make an objective impactassessment.At the Second Meeting of the WG on SMEs held on 21-22 May 2003 at the BSECPERMIS Headquarters in Istanbul, the Turkish Delegation presented the “Information Networkof SMEs” which was a presentation of “KOB•NET” (SME information networkhttp://www.kobinet.org.tr/) and its services. It was explained that similar network could bedesigned for BSEC and that the new network could be linked with KOB•NET. The aim was todevelop the business to business (B2B) e-commerce relations among SMEs. It covered thebasic profile information of SMEs in seven languages. KOB•NET provided value added networkservices through the Euro Info Centre (EIC) at KOSGEB. Visiting this site one can be stated,that BSEC countries do not use it. It is difficult to understand what is the essence of it and howdoes it work.The BSEC Business Council (BC) presented the Business Information Systems developedby the BSEC BC (www.bsec-business.org) that is a depository of important businessinformation on each BSEC Member State. Unfortunately this side is not valid.It was also mentioned that in parallel, the BC was operating the Black Sea BusinessInformation Network (www.bsbin.com) administrated and hosted by the Chamber of Commerceand Industry of Romania. (BSBIN) is the Business Information Exchange System of the 12 BSECmember countries and is developed in order to gather and disseminate business information worldwideand to promote the interests of the businesspeople from the BSEC countries, mainly of theSmall and Medium Sized Enterprises. This site is active and well maintained.Following the decisions of the First Meeting of the WG on SMEs, Bulgaria presented aproject proposal on the “Identification and monitoring of the barriers to cooperation and tradefrom the point of view of the SMEs in order of further elimination of these barriers.” In thisconnection, the representative of the BSEC BC suggested that each BSEC country shouldidentify 3 major barriers that its SMEs are facing when trading with the other 10 countries. Thislist with 10x3 = 30 barriers should be sent to the PERMIS within the next four months.It is worth to mention that during the two years-term under the Turkish Chairmanshipin-Chargethe Ministry of Industry and Trade of Turkey and the Small and Medium IndustryDevelopment organization (KOSGEB) offers their services to promote the entrepreneurship andSME development in the region. However, the final result of this project is unknown.The Third Meeting of the WG on SMEs was held only 19 months later as the secondone on 12-13 January 2005. It seems that the Hellenic Chairmanship-in-Charge was not veryfavour at organizing this event, which reflects also on the very poor agenda. The main activityof the Greek suggestion was invitation of the representatives of the BSEC countries to the 6 thInternational Exhibition of Plastics, Machines and Recycling (PLASTICA 2005) aiming at11 Declaration on SMEs and the Dawn of the 21 st Century – Questionnaire 2005 on the Implementation of theDeclaration and Development of Entrepreneurship and SME Sector in the BSEC Member States. UNECE,ECE/TCU/2005/1 as of 10 January 2005, Geneva-Istanbul8