Benchmark Study 1

IPP BENCHMARK REPORT
The agency has also submitted several international cooperation project proposals that are going
under the procedure of evaluation.
IDAL considers participation in international projects and other business promotion incentives as a
substantial contribution to fulfilment of its activities. .
o Budget and Staff
Currently 195 people are employed at IDAL, including 68 specialists working with EU Structural
Funds programmes’ projects, 20 specialists working closely with promotion of export of Latvian
companies abroad and 12 specialists in the sphere of attraction of foreign investments. In addition
13 highly qualified specialists are employed in Foreign Economic Representative Offices in Norway,
Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, UK, Russia and Japan.
o Main results
Indicators used to measure success: each year in cooperation with Ministry of Economics of Republic
of Latvia a detailed activity plan is elaborated, it includes the indicators.
o Main bottlenecks
The main bottlenecks concerning a more active involvement in international activities is lack of
financial as well as human resources.
Conditions of cross-border cooperation programmes are more complex, as the 6th and 7th
Framework Programme projects. Consequently, participation in the third target cross-border
program requires about 30% of the workforce to devote resources to supporting documentation
gathering, compilation and report preparation. Particularly in public institutions motivation for
participation in these program projects will reduce the discrepancies in legislation of the EU and the
Latvian Republic, restrictions on new job creation for projects, in addition to the restrictions on
working hours, prohibition of project expenditures include money leave, sick pay even though the in
the BSR program that is allowed, restrictions of the premiums for the increased workload in
combination with substantially more complex accounting and reporting procedures, differences in
planning periods - UK finance calendar year, the EU projects irregular, for example, from August to
February. As a result, the employee on the same salary has more work. In the case of business and
public organizations, the problem is the restrictions of state aid to match the projects in combination
with the requirement to 100% and 15% pre-financing for the execution of the same organizations.
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