Failure or success: assessing the European Commission’s new strategy to foster EU’s economic recovery

ABSTRACT

The European Commission launched in November 2014 an Investment Plan for Europe to foster Europe’s economic recovery. Despite prognosis of failure, in 2016 Juncker announced the success of the Plan and proposed its extension. Using as theoretical framework an adaptation of Bovens and ‘t Hart’s model of two logics of policy evaluation (political and programmatic) (1996; 2016), our goal is to answer the question: Is the Investment plan truly a success as claimed by the Commission? Our findings suggest that although the Plan scored fairly poorly as the reputation goes, the perception is gradually improving over time. In terms of performance, most of the numbers are in line with, or above, the expected results for the timeframe of the analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Juncker’s investment plan
• European Commission
• policy failure
• policy success

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Any errors or omissions are the authors’ sole responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See for example Barroso Commission work programmes for 2013 and 2014.

2. ECOFIN Council informal meeting of 13 September 2014.

3. The G20 Brisbane Action plan, published on 16 November 2014, also welcomed the Investment Plan: ‘Additionally, the European Union in October announced a major initiative mobilizing additional public and private investment over 2015–17. We call for swift implementation of these packages’ (G20 2014, 4).

4. COM(2014) 903 final, 26.11.2014.

5. The reaction of external stakeholders is addressed in the reputation section.

6. The proposal for a Regulation on EFSI was adopted at first reading by the EP on 24 June 2015 and by the Council on 25 June 2015.

7. We adopt here a broad definition of ‘interest’ that does not necessary means individual or self-interest. In fact, we assume that stakeholders’ analysis could be influenced by what they perceive will be the consequences of the policy not for themselves but for the community they represent or the cause they support.

8. Arguably, these were valid criticisms as the announced successor of the Investment Plan for Europe, the InvestEU (which was presented by the Commission on June 2018), will include new national and regional financial partners in order to avoid the allegedly lack of a regional dimension in the first Investment Plan.

9. A fundamental distinction exists between the approval of projects and the disbursement of funds. There is a gap between both moments and sometimes it is possible that planed funds are not disbursed. The analysis in this section relies on the data provided by the assessment reports and gives no clear indiction of how much money was actually disbursed.

10. During the process of refereeing of this article, the European Commission proposed the extension of the EFSI until 2020, with a €500bn. target. The Council of Ministers and the European Parliament agreed.

Additional information

Funding

This study was conducted at Research Center in Political Science (UID/CPO/0758/2019), University of Minho/University of Evora and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds.