Italy's Machine-Tool Builders Push to Streamline Export Financing Regs.

UCIMU, the union of Italian machine-tool producers, has petitioned foreign trade minister Piero Fassino to improve finance instruments aimed at exporters. The group singled out Italy's SACE regulations that assure export credits. Compared to similar programs that operate in other European countries like Germany's Hermes and France's Coface, the SACE organization is seen as bogged down in bureaucracy. Why not liberalize the activities of SACE, Hermes, Coface and other programs, even on a European Union level? Asks UCIMU president Flavio Radice.

      European trade experts agree that some combination of export-support
   policies could be put on the European Union agenda in several years, but
   not soon.

Italy is the world's fourth-largest producer of machine tools and the third-largest exporter. Its builders' group is forecasting a slow-down in exports, based on a trend that started in the middle of calendar 1998.

UCIMU Sistemi per Produrre, Milan, Italy. 39-0226255-1.