Cohesion Funds, for 2014-20 spent only 36 out of 116 billion
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The premises are pitiless, the conclusions almost as clear-cut. The report on the state of implementation of the European and national cohesion policy, presented yesterday in the Council of Ministers by the Minister for European Affairs, the South and the Pnrr, Raffaele Fitto, starts from the observation that Italy is one of the major beneficiaries of the funds of cohesion but ranks among the last in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in the use of the resources allocated in comparison with the other member countries: expenditure percentage equal to 55% of the programmed, against a European average of 69%.
The over 90-page document, which refers to the 2014-2020 programming period, highlights the betrayal of the principle of additionality of funds, enshrined in the European Treaties, and the “development trap” into which the southern territories ended up which, even not only as a result of the crisis triggered by Covid-19, they are paradoxically seeing the gap with the more developed areas of the country grow and not decrease. In the final part, then, the Report highlights problems of fund monitoring, governance and, in the case of the Development and Cohesion Fund, based on national resources, also an unresolved problem of plunder in favor of territorial emergency micro-interventions detached from a strong contextual and evaluative analysis.
The budget
The overall analysis of the 2014-2020 funds – summing up the structural funds (ESF and ERDF), the related national co-financing and the development and cohesion fund (in its two articulations Poc, i.e. complementary operational plans, and PSc, i.e. development and cohesion plans) – reports at the end of October 2022 payments stopped at 34%. Out of 126.6 billion, only 46.1 were spent. Net of emergency interventions for Covid, it is instead 36.5 billion out of 116.2 (31.5%). In the specific case of EU funds, for which we have a final reporting obligation at the end of 2023, the total expenditure to be implemented up to December is equal to 29.9 billion euros (46% of the value of the programmed resources). It is a question of being able to report in one year approximately what has been done from 2015 to today.
In the share of European resources, the integration that arrived, following the Covid-19 crisis, with the new React-EU instrument must also be considered, which signals, according to the Report, a “particularly critical” picture, with “a total of certified to the European Commission equal to 1.8 billion, corresponding to 12.5% of the programmed resources (14.5 billion), with some Programs registering zero certification». In general, however, an even more worrying situation concerns national resources, because evidently without the nightmare of disengagement, and therefore of the loss of funds, and without recourse to the notorious “bank projects”, the spending capacities of individual administrations are even worse. The Development and Cohesion Fund records a payment percentage of 13.2% with reference to the PSC plans and 11.7% with regard to the Poc.
The new programming
The report presented by Fitto and sent to Parliament officially outlines the need to revise the 2021-2027 Partnership Agreement, considered no longer current also due to the changed context after the war in Ukraine. This is programming worth 74 billion euros, of which 42.2 from EU resources. The primary need, it is observed, is “to strengthen the element of integration with the Pnrr”.
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