• European Commission
• Enlargement
• How does it work?
• Financial assistance
• Phare

Phare Programme Types

National Programmes

National Programmes account for most of the Phare budget and are agreed bilaterally with each partner country. Accession Partnerships and Regular Reports allow the EU to identify weaknesses in the candidate countries’ ability to adopt the acquis or fulfil their accession criteria, and give indications of the type of actions that need to be undertaken. Each candidate country then draws up its own National Programme for the Adoption of the Acquis (NPAA), which indicates the timetable required to rectify these problems as well as an estimate of the human and financial resources that need to be allocated for this purpose. This must be endorsed by the European Union, at which point it becomes a National Development Programme (NDP), which is the basis for Phare programming. 2003 was the final year for National Programmes for the new Member States, but this process continues with Bulgaria and Romania until their accession.

The total Phare allocation for 2003 was 1703 Million Euros, of which 1223 Million Euros was allocated as part of the national programmes.

In addition to the National Programmes, the Phare programme also provides financial assistance to Bulgaria, Lithuania and Slovakia geared towards early de-commissioning of nuclear reactors, usually by way of Decommissioning Support Funds, managed by the EBRD.

Cross-Border Co-operation (CBC)

Phare CBC was introduced in 1994 to assist border regions in the applicant countries overcome their specific development problems and integrate more closely with the European Union, with other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and within their own national economies. A long term aim of CBC was thus to accelerate the economic convergence of applicant countries with the European Union in a balanced manner that prevents the emergence of peripheral economic zones, and to prepare candidate countries for future participation in the INTERREG programme. Cross-border assistance is implemented in accordance with the Commission Regulation No 2760/98 as amended by Regulations No 1596/2002 and No 1822/2003, and is based on Joint Programming Documents and managed by the Joint Co-operation Committees.

Until 2003, Phare CBC focused on promoting co-operation between the border regions of Central and Eastern Europe and adjacent regions of the European Community, as well as border regions between applicant countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Given the accession of 8 Phare countries in 2004, the Phare CBC Regulation has been amended in order to update the list of countries which remain eligible and, on the same occasion, the scope of the Phare CBC programme has been extended to cover the Bulgarian border with Turkey and the Bulgarian and Romanian borders with their adjacent TACIS and CARDS countries (Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia and Montenegro and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). In addition to this, the Commission Communication ‘Paving the way for a New Neighbourhood Instrument’ ( COM(2003) 393 of 1 July 2003) envisages the PHARE CBC Joint Programming Documents for Bulgarian and Romanian external borders as a useful basis for its ‘Neighbourhood’ programme, designed to boost co-operation between an enlarged EU and neighbouring non-candidate countries.

Between 2000 and 2003, € 163 million was available each year to the Phare CBC programme, representing approximately 10% of the total yearly Phare commitment. In 2003, this figure was supplemented by an External Border Initiative (€33 Million Euros) aiming to support CBC-type investments at the future external border of the EU as well as to help acceding countries to prepare for INTERREG and Neighbourhood Programmes upon accession.

Multi-Country & Horizontal Programmes

In order to deepen Institution Building in key areas (such as support for civil society, support to customs or participation in Community programmes), assistance previously provided under Multi-Country Programmes has increasingly been integrated into national programmes. As a result, multi-country programmes are now used only in cases where their adequacy is specifically demonstrated or where they can be considered as the most efficient and effective delivery instrument in view of economies of scale or the need to promote regional co-operation. Consequently, a certain number of multi-country programmes continue to be implemented. The largest of these have been developed in co-operation with International Financial Institutions and deal with the promotion of small and medium-sized enterprises. These SME facilities encourage intermediary banks to provide finance to SME’s in the partner countries. They are complementary to the support for SME development provided through the national programmes. There are also programmes, developed in cooperation with IFIs as well, to promote municipal infrastructure. Other ongoing Multi-country programmes involve, inter alia, TAIEX, Sigma, Monitoring and Evaluation, Statistics, Environment and Institution Building in the field of fighting fraud.

Multi-country programmes are both planned and implemented centrally. Horizontal programmes, on the other hand, are planned centrally, but implemented in a decentralised way, i.e. by the candidate countries. Ongoing horizontal programmes include projects focusing on the effectiveness of independent nuclear safety regulatory authorities in these candidate countries and projects to introduce an Extended Decentralised Implementation System (EDIS) in the candidate countries.