29/01/2019
The European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI) helps finance strategic investments in key areas such as infrastructure, research and innovation, education, renewable energy and energy efficiency. It acts as an EU budgetary guarantee given to the EIB Group. The aim of the EFSI is to enable the EIB and the EIF to provide additional funding to eligible projects in the EU and mobilise additional private and public investment for these projects. We concluded that the EFSI helped the EIB to provide more higher-risk finance for investments, financed many investment projects that could not otherwise have taken place, attracted additional public and private investment to those projects and supported investments in many policy sectors across the EU.
However, we found that some EFSI support just replaced other EIB and EU financing, part of the finance went to projects that could have used other sources of public or private finance, estimates of additional investment attracted by EFSI were sometimes overstated and most investments went to a few larger EU 15 Member States with well-established national promotional banks.
Special report no 03/2019: European Fund for Strategic Investments: Action needed to make EFSI a full success
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