Parliamentary Testimony
An overview of the Recovery and Resilience Plans
Testimony before the European Parliament’s Committee for Budgetary Control (CONT) on the topic "Capacity for proper expenditure controls of the increased budget of the MFF and NGEU".
On 25 October 2021, Zsolt Darvas, Bruegel Senior Fellow, gave testimony to the public hearing of the European Parliament’s Committee for Budgetary Control (CONT) on the topic “Capacity for proper expenditure controls of the increased budget of the MFF and NGEU”.
He highlighted the implausibility of the European Commission’s assessment concluding that the quality of EU countries’ recovery and resilience plans are almost identical. The presentation stressed the importance of carefully checking the value for money and the avoidance of double funding by other EU funds in the implementation phase of the recovery plans, because no EU country was able to justify costs to a high degree according to the Commission’s assessment. The presentation concluded with 10 crucial questions, including the issues of additionality, absorption capacity, whether milestones and targets are similarly difficult across countries, and transparency of the implementation of the recovery plans.
