Industry, Tourism and Trade Minister, Miguel Sebastián, announced the government’s AvanzaDos plan at the beginning of September in Santander to be launched before the end of the year. It includes new strategic elements and a medium term vision to 2012. The minister explained that one of the novelties of the plan, in a framework for strengthening infrastructures, is to award those Town Halls that help improve mobile phone coverage.
During his inaugural presentation at the XXI Telecommunications Meeting, organized by the Menéndez Pelayo International University and the Association of Electronics, IT and Telecommunications Companies of Spain (AETIC), Sebastián highlighted the fact that for the first time some of the funds of the Plan Avanza have been raised in collaboration with regional cities and governments, which have all signed Framework Collaboration Agreements to year 2010. This collaboration has enabled 1,302 million euros to be raised, of which the MITYC has provided 1,103 million.
The Industry Minister went on to underscore the major budgetary efforts required for the execution of the Plan Avanza. More than 5,000 million euros have been injected into the system for the 2005-2008 period and more than 3,800 million euros more have been raised as a result of the collaboration of other public administrations, non-profit organizations and companies; “which have provided and provide the boost our country needs to confront decisively and with resources the challenges we meet in this field”.
In the opinion of Sebastián, the growing use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) by Spaniards has had a large number of positive effects including an appreciable increase in levels of productivity. It is therefore not so much a question of increasing the ICT sector’s percentage of GDP, but rather about ensuring the technologies are used ever-more intensively across all economic sectors.
“It is not just about us all playing a part in the ICT sector, but about the ICT sector doing its best in all of us”. Making use of the New Technologies in our day-to-day lives and getting the general public and companies to adopt technological advances naturally, and in an economically and socially efficient way is the true challenge we are confronted with explained the Minister.
According to Miguel Sebastián, in the current economic climate, which is uncertain in terms of the development of the main macro-economic indicators, and difficult for most of the sectors comprising our economy; “the ICT macro-sector can and must play a major role, since in addition to providing added value to the whole range of activities in our economy, it contributes to laying the foundations of a new model of growth based on R&D and Innovation, on the reduction of inflation and on alleviating the trade deficit”.
The minister concluded by underscoring the five main areas of action of government policy in this field: strengthening infrastructures; security improvements in the use of the technologies; increasing the technological skills of the general public and companies; optimizing the quality of services; and generating industrial development centered on the new technologies.
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