Establishing the InvestEU programme

Briefing 26-10-2018

Building on the Investment Plan for Europe, the Commission proposes to create the InvestEU programme, which would bring various existing EU financial instruments into a single structure. This would contribute to the cross-cutting MFF objectives (simplification, flexibility, synergies, coherence) and to the budgetary aim of ‘doing more with less’. This proposal, which would seek to mobilise public and private investments to reduce investment gaps, is based on the stakeholder consultation and different ex post evaluations of the programmes having relevancy for the InvestEU programme. The IA accompanying the proposal provides a thorough description of the challenges in investment, comprising both qualitative and quantitative elements, and links the proposed measures to the identified challenges. The IA discusses also risks and mitigating measures, although the risks and risk management could perhaps have elaborated in more detail. As regards alternative options, the IA discusses some options (implementing partners, organisation of governance, blending and combinations of the support) but does not provide an assessment and comparison of various options as is normally required under the better regulation guidelines. It would have benefited the analysis if the assessment of the expected competitiveness, economic, social and environmental impacts had been more elaborated as in this respect the IA is not very informative.