https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2194-8293
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article examines the impact of supranational investment policies on the resilience of the common market project and its impact on core-periphery dynamics. Reconstructing the hybrid governance processes around the Investment Plan for Europe (2015–2020) and its geographical distribution, it finds that these policies were effective in channelling funds to the Southern periphery after the Eurozone crisis, but aggravated the core-periphery dynamic for Eastern Europe. This fact stems from the differential presence of national public financing institutions as well as unevenly developed capital markets, two factors that are linked to the multi-level and public-private governance mix in the EU’s investment policies. These results hold implications for how to assess follow-up programs such as InvestEU and the Sustainable Investment Plan in the European Green Deal.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Kamila Duraj and Dan Mocanu for excellent research support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. In this paper, we understand this attempt to increase resilience as mitigating disruptive asymmetric shocks and market failures as well as addressing the disparities inherently produced through the mode of market integration.
2. These institutions are defined in EU regulation as ‘legal entities carrying out financial activities on a professional basis which are given a mandate by a member state or a member state’s entity at central, regional or local level, to carry out development or promotional activities’ (European Commission Citation2015, 10).
3. In this vein, in a recent study on the benefits of the single market, Mion and Ponattu (Citation2019) show that while most countries have seen welfare and productivity gains in relative terms, the estimates suggest a reproduction of uneven development by the process of single market integration, let alone an amplification of within-country regional disparities.
4. The reinterpretation and the expansion of the EIB’s lending portfolio followed a historical process, whereby the EIB’s expansion is determined by processes of enlargement and market integration (Clifton, Díaz-Fuentes, and Gómez Citation2017; Kavvadia Citation2018).
5. See https://www.eib.org/de/efsi/index.htm, last accessed 7 March 2021.
6. EU-9 is composed of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Sweden; EU-5 of Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain; and EU-13 of Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. This distinction is largely compatible with both core-periphery analysis (Weissenbacher Citation2020) and EU classifications. The latter also uses EU-15 for grouping EU-9, EU-5 and the UK. We adhere to this classification when referring to its use in official documentation.
7. Due to their success, these instruments had already been further expanded in the context of the 2014–2020 MFF, which allocated 20.5bn EUR to financial instruments (European Court of Auditors Citation2019, 11),
8. For this analysis, we also draw on semi-structured interviews with the EIB group, NPBIs as well as the European Commission, conducted between 2018 and 2021, as background material and for validation. A full list can be obtained from the authors.
9. The EIB alone hired 1143 people between 2015 and 2018, with the EIF hiring an additional 209 (EIB annual reports EIB Citation2015, Citation2019b).
10. This was problematic given that the goal of EFSI is to undertake investment which contain higher risk. As the European Court of Auditor (European Court of Auditors Citation2019, 19) notes, ‘low risk sharing instruments are dominating the EIB EFSI window’, with ‘around €17 billion or ca. 62% of the total IIW amount signed’ being low risk.
11. By the end of 2016, a total of only three investment platforms were set up.
12. In line with these goals, two new investment categories were developed, bioeconomy and regional development (for a first report on these activities s. EIB Citation2021b).