Full Forum 2017
Vienna Initiative Full Forum 2017
Annual Full Forum Meeting of the Vienna Initiative, Luxembourg, 6 March 2017
The 9th meeting of the Vienna Initiative 2 Full Forum took place on 6 March at the headquarters of the European Investment Bank, in Luxembourg. Vienna Initiative partners met to discuss the Vienna Initiative’s achievements over the past year, ongoing work and to outline the objectives for the initiative for the next year.
At this meeting, the Vienna Initiative has agreed to establish a Working Group on Capital Markets Union. This follows the European Union’s push to strengthen Capital Markets which will have a major impact on financing of investment and sustaining growth in the Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe region (CESEE).
During other sessions held at the event the Vienna Initiative looked into investment dynamics, priorities and constraints in the region and discussed how new instruments provided by the international financial institutions, focusing on environment, infrastructure, innovation and SMEs can supplement existing funding models.
The Forum also took note of the fact that the economies of the region all showed fairly strong growth in 2016, and that this is expected to continue in 2017.
Participants of the Full Forum included representatives of Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine; major bank groups operating emerging Europe: Erste, Intesa Sanpaolo, KBC, Raiffeisen, Société Genérale, and UniCredit, National Bank Greece, Eurobank; as well as the European Commission, the European Council, the EBRD, the EIB, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank Group. The EBA, ECB, ESM and the BIS participated as observers.
The Vienna Initiative (European Bank Coordination initiative) seeks to safeguard the stability of the financial sector in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe. It is a forum in which international private and public sector actors take coordinated decisions.
The initiative was created and is driven by the EIB, the European Commission, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Representatives from all of these institutions will speak at the Steering Committee Meeting.
Read the full report of the proceedings of the Full Forum 2017 here.