Synthesis Report - European Commission - Europa

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Synthesis Report Ex-post Evaluation of the ERDF 2000-2006 ‘promot(ing) economic and social progress and a high level of employment and to achieve balanced and sustainable development, in particular through …. the strengthening of economic and social cohesion…’ 3 Although territorial cohesion was added explicitly to economic and social cohesion only subsequently, in practice, it is implicit in the aim of ‘balanced and sustainable development’, so that policy objectives were much the same in the period being examined here as now. This is evident from the form which cohesion policy took in the various parts of the EU in the period. These multiple goals complicate the evaluation. It means that the performance of the policy cannot be judged simply in terms of the economic convergence of the regions assisted towards the EU average. It is all the more so since the relative weight attached to the objectives differed across regions reflecting their needs and priorities. Moreover, the relative weight concerned was rarely spelled out in any detail in programming documents or policy statements, which further adds to the difficulties of the evaluation. THE APPROACH ADOPTED Ex post evaluations of previous programming periods have attempted to provide a comprehensive coverage of the programmes supported by the ERDF in all of the regions in each of the EU Member States. Such an approach had limited success, largely because of the sheer number of programmes involved. This made it impossible to go into the detail necessary to properly assess the results and effects of all of them within a reasonable time-frame and with a reasonable amount of resources. Accordingly, the reports produced tended to be overly general and superficial in their analysis of the performance of policy over the period in question, failing to provide firm, empirically supported conclusions regarding its achievements and deficiencies. As such, they were limited in the advice and guidance they could offer for the formulation and implementation of cohesion policy in the future. In response to these failings and the evident difficulty of assessing all 230 or so programmes in 25 Member States comprehensively without a massive expansion in the resources devoted to the task and the time taken, the present evaluation instead adopted a more selective approach. This was to divide the evaluation into 14 Work Packages which examined separate issues of policy relevance and which between them covered most of the expenditure co-financed by the ERDF (details of these Work Packages and of those responsible for them are set out at the beginning of this report). In particular, three Work Packages covered policy areas which absorbed the bulk of funding: • enterprise and innovation • transport • the environment Broadly defined to include support for tourism as part of enterprise support and the physical as well as the natural environment as part of the environment, these together accounted for around 85% of total ERDF funding in the programming period. A number of cross-cutting issues were also examined: • gender equality, which was included in the guidelines to the Structural Funds as a horizontal priority, 3 Treaty of Amsterdam, Article B, 1997. 8
Ex-post Evaluation of the ERDF 2000-2006 Synthesis Report • demographic change, which was included as part of the study of gender equality since it raised similar issues, even though it was not an explicit horizontal priority in the guidelines; • sustainable development and climate change, which were included as part of two separate Work Packages • the cost effectiveness of major projects, which was concerned with trying to compare the unit costs of major construction projects across the EU. In addition, three separate studies were carried out into issues of policy relevance: • the contribution of Objective 2 support for restructuring in the regions assisted in the context of globalisation; • the contribution of the ERDF to the development of rural areas, which was the specific focus of the EAGGF but there were many rural areas in the regions supported by the ERDF under Objective 1 and Objective 2; • the performance of the system for managing and implementing the ERDF in different countries and regions and its contribution to the design and implementation of effective cohesion policies as well as the spill-over of the principles embedded in the system into other policy areas. Two further pieces of work were also undertaken as part of the evaluation: • the construction of a database of quantitative indicators used by Member States to monitor policy in the different programme areas, • the deployment of two macroeconomic models, specially constructed to incorporate the expenditure on investment financed by the Structural Funds, to estimate the effects of intervention on the growth of the economies receiving funding. To provide the background to the different Work Packages – to set out the context in which cohesion policy was operated – and to compile a common set of data to feed into them, analysis was undertaken as well on: • the growth of GDP and employment in assisted and non-assisted regions and changes in regional disparities in the EU over the 2000-2006 period; • the allocation of Objective 1 and 2 funding between policy areas, the counterpart national co-financing and the contribution from the private sector to expenditure; • the development policies pursued across the EU and their coherence with economic theory and the recommendations of major international organisations; • regional developments over the programming period and the ERDF contribution to tackling development problems in all 25 Member States in the form of succinct national reports; • the types of NUTS 3 regions receiving financial support under Objective 2 and how the ERDF was allocated between policy areas in the regions concerned 4 . 4 These various pieces of analysis were carried out under Work Package 1 by the people and organisations listed in the description above, who were also responsible for assisting in the coordination of the ex post evaluation and in advising on the analysis undertaken in the various Work Packages. 9
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Synthesis Report - European Commission - Europa

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