The ‘Recovery and Resilience Facility’ (RRF), the financial arm of the Next Generation EU recovery plan, is “not result-oriented” in terms of the reforms and investments implemented, according to a note published in early April by the think tank Bruegel.
The experts scrutinised the recovery plans of seven Member States (Germany, France, Spain, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and Romania). In particular, they note the wide variety of ‘milestones’ that Member States have included in their plans to assess progress in delivering the reforms and investments they have committed to in return for the grants, and perhaps loans, they receive from the common European loan.
The vast majority of milestones relate to ‘input indicators’, i.e. the financial/material/human resources used, as well as ‘output indicators’, e.g. the number of people trained, but very few relate to ‘result indicators’ or the impact of a reform or project.
Within the panel examined, the Italian (19% of indicators are results indicators), Finnish (17%) and Romanian (15%) plans are the most in line with a performance logic, according to the authors of the analysis.
Bruegel recommends that any future performance-based budgetary instrument should clearly define what the legislator means by measuring the outcome of reform and investment. As this impact assessment can be time-consuming and more risky than the original objectives, the think tank believes that ‘input and output indicators’ should remain, and ‘result indicators’ should play ‘a prominent role’.
It also calls for harmonisation of the indicators used to facilitate comparative assessments of national plans arising from an EU-funded initiative.
See the analysis of Bruegel: https://aeur.eu/f/6bs (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)