Article 57 of the Common Provisions Regulation 1303/2013 (CPR) charges DG REGIO with conducting an evaluation of the European Regional Development Fund and Cohesion Fund by the end of 2024. The purpose of this evaluation is to assess the achievements of the operational programmes funded during the 2014-2020 programming period.
The evaluation will examine the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of investments co-financed by the ERDF and Cohesion Fund in the 2014-2020 period, their coherence with other policies, their relevance, and the EU added value. It will seek to identify factors contributing to the success or failure of these investments under different socio-economic conditions, and will highlight good practices and their contribution to growth, sustainable development and job creation.
The evaluation will be structured as a matrix of five cross-cutting and eight thematic work packages managed by the evaluation unit in DG REGIO.
Summary: This study was the first attempt to collect, harmonise and aggregate - at an EU level - the data produced by the ERDF/CF project monitoring systems on the basis of national and regional monitoring data rather than available public lists. This rich set of data makes available a unique data source on ERDF and CF programmes funded during the 2014-2020 time-period for the ex post evaluation 2014-2020. Both in terms of granularity and coverage, it expands beyond what is available in public lists of operation, public open data platforms at national level.
The study resulted in the preparation of a “Single Database” covering 215 Programmes (OPs) financed by the ERDF and/or CF and 73 Interreg Programmes (CPs), across the 12 Thematic Objectives (TOs) (i.e., 96% of the total number of programmes in scope). It covers 585,000 operations (dataset on operations), 1,169,000 beneficiaries (dataset on beneficiaries) as well as common and programme-specific output indicators that could be collected at the operation level (713,600 common output indicators and 491,500 programme-specific output indicators (dataset on indicators). The study also examined the structure and efficiency of monitoring systems and the quality and reliability of monitoring data.
