Business reality during COVID

Economic history confirms that the specificity of each crisis indicates the confining influence of external factors on the small businesses, resulting in a severe rise of bankruptcy and unemployment.

Despite national governments actions to mitigate the negative effects, this support is noticeably insufficient to avoid a deep crisis. Multiple public institutions at regional and local levels must be involved and support the companies in a downturn. That is why the project will gather together local experience from urban areas of the V4 & EaP region to share best practices and contribute to ensuring a supportive framework for SMEs in the post-crisis context. All these activities are useful not only in the first impact of the economy freezing negative effects but even for the next period of prosperity the developed tools and partnerships might be useful for the local context. The crisis will significantly reduce the potential of MSMEs and those surviving will require the involvement of new resources, new approaches, complex solutions to adapt their economic strategies to the new context. It is necessary to use the undiscovered potential of public institutions and SHARING ECONOMY MODEL to support MSME, to rethink and recreate linkages and partnerships at the local and regional level.