València. The President of the Generalitat, Ximo Puig, has asked the regions of the European Union to unite to constitute a "political cluster" that will allow "to regain momentum for European construction".
"When countries transfer sovereignty to the Union, regions and cities acquire a greater territorial role", said Puig, who also defended the "subsidiarity principle" as a mechanism to adjust policies to the measure of each geographical area and thus promote an economic transformation resulting in growth.
The head of the regional government took part in the opening session of the second edition of the European conference GROW your REGIOn, held in Valencia on 8 and 9 November. In particular, it opened the high-level meeting at which the panel discussion entitled 'Accelerating industrial modernisation as a whole' was held.
During his speech, the president said that the Comunitat Valenciana is committed to "intelligent interregional collaboration that improves the lives of people in our regions".
Puig pointed out that the regions have "the advantage of proximity to drive change at the microeconomic level", which allows them to "collaborate effectively with companies, workers, research centres and various social agents".
As the head of the Valencian Executive has argued, the regions are the "basis for the future of Europe". In this regard, he listed the advances in R&D in the region and stressed that, despite the difficulties caused by underfinancing, it is "the second region that has most improved its rate of innovation" in the latest report on regional innovation prepared by the European Union. In addition, as he also pointed out, 12% of the number of innovative companies in Spain already come from the Comunitat Valenciana.
The President also stressed that, since 2015, the Comunitat Valenciana has revised its industrial policy to include "more powerful instruments" to connect the "triple helix" comprising administration, business knowledge and academic research, which is particularly important, he said, when "60% of R&D expenditure is carried out by the public sector -mainly university- and only 40% by the private sector".
As Puig also pointed out, the economic policy promoted by the Valencian government is fundamentally oriented towards improving productivity through innovation in order to gain competitiveness.
This is why it has emphasized the importance of industrial specialization as a tool to compete "in a global world" and, in this sense, has made reference to the experience of the Comunitat Valenciana, which has in its territory with "wide geographical concentrations of companies in sectors such as ceramics, footwear, textiles, furniture, toys and marble".
The President also highlighted, in statements to the media, the election of the Valencia Region as the venue for this second edition of the European conference GROW your REGIOn, something that - he pointed out - "is another example of European confidence with this land".
"Our region has chosen the path of innovation to improve its competitiveness, the path of making it better rather than just cheaper", concluded the president.
European interregional meeting
The GROW your REGIOn European conference is an initiative jointly organised by the European Commission's Directorates-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs and for Regional Policy, in collaboration with the Generalitat.
The aim of this meeting is to generate knowledge on the development and dissemination of intelligent specialisation strategies (RIS3), with a special emphasis on the ways in which clusters have boosted the growth of European regions.
Based on this premise, the conference seeks to actively exchange knowledge between the people and entities involved in order to promote, on the one hand, intelligent interregional collaboration through clusters and, on the other hand, to multiply the connections between value chains in order to generate benefits in the territories and urban centres of the European community.
