Commission staff working document

The horizontal action ‘Promo’ highlights the region’s strengths and helps to join forces in the internal and external promotion of the region. The overall goal is to strengthen the competitiveness of the Baltic Sea region and to show that the region fulfils the Europe 2020 Strategy goals of being a smart, sustainable and inclusive region.

The branding and identity building of the Baltic Sea region have been on the high-level political agenda for over a decade. Many policy-makers have agreed that the Baltic Sea region needs a clearer and more competitive brand identity for the following purposes:

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  to achieve more effective investment promotion;
  
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  to attract more visitors for leisure and business travel and tourism;
  
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  to attract and retain the best and the brightest talent;
  
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  to leverage exports through an improved ‘region of origin’ effect;
  
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  to build on complementarities of strengths between mature and transitioning economies.
  

The benefits of pooling resources are clear: it delivers more global outreach and attention, economies of scale and increases resources for transnational product development.

The EUSBSR provides a framework for coordination and collaboration but also a long-term perspective for the region’s branding and identity-building efforts. This framework needs to be filled with content and projects, and it is up to the different pan-Baltic, national, regional and local actors to do so across the various priority areas in a coordinated, inclusive and collaborative manner.

A comprehensive system for the design, the monitoring and the follow-up of indicators and targets will be set up in 2013, under the responsibility of the horizontal action leaders. The still missing targets and deadline, baseline, and statistics/information sources related to the below indicators will be defined.