The Nordic-Baltic Business Community: The Recovery and Resilience Scoreboard must ensure efficient spending of the EU funds

Confederation of Finnish Industries together with its Nordic and Baltic sister-organisations call for sustainable and efficient spending of the EU Recovery and Resilience funds, and this week presented its proposal for an EU Recovery Scoreboard to the European Commission.

In addition to monitoring reforms and assessing Member States’ spending on climate, digital and R&D plans, the scoreboard must also be able to evaluate the impact of the reforms and investments and show how labour markets perform in the Member States.

It is crucial that the Commission establishes a process for developing and disseminating best practice and examples of effective approaches. This is to incentivise Member States to use the considerable EU funds available to make significant steps towards green and digital transitions while improving the internal market and global competitiveness.

Member States are currently in the process of preparing recovery and resilience plans that set out a coherent package of reforms and public investment projects which will be funded from the €672,5 billion loans and grants fund. The Recovery and Resilience Facility offers an unprecedented opportunity to speed up the recovery in Europe following the Covid19 crisis and reinforce the commitment to the twin transitions: green and digital. As the Commission will assess the national plans, it should create a publicly available Recovery Scoreboard that continuously evaluates the effectiveness of the various measures at both national and at major project levels.