The 2014-2020 ERDF and Cohesion Fund programmes saw reinforced use of common indicators to measure investment outputs. How does the system work?

This data set provides information on the indicative list of major projects from the ERDF and Cohesion Fund programmes 2014-2020 and details on the projects so far presented for the approval of the Commission. The data set will be updated regularly to reflect changes in the programme lists and major project notifications. Financial Data is in current prices.

‘Major Projects’ are usually large-scale infrastructure projects in the transport and environment sectors, but some may also involve investments in the energy, research, ICT and other sectors supported by the ERDF or the Cohesion Fund. The total eligible cost for a project to be designated "major" is generally more than € 50 million, but € 75m for transport and energy networks under Thematic Objective 7 - Transport and other strategic networks. Due to their scale and importance the planned major projects are specifically listed in the Operational Programmes and are then subject to an assessment and a specific approval by the European Commission on the basis of documentation including Cost-Benefit Analysis and feasibility studies.

To facilitate their assessment various procedures for sending major projects to the Commission are provided for. (There are separate procedures for projects phased between different financing periods). The Member States are recommended to use independent experts (from the JASPERS initiative) to appraise their projects.

If downloading, check the format of financial amounts and where necessary change you regional settings and default formatting in your chosen software. You can check the results of your aggregation of the financial data by comparing results with the pre-formatted charts profiled on this metadata page under “featured content”.

High quality, safe and sufficient drinking water is essential for our daily life and economic activities. Cohesion policy contributes to EU water policy by allocating EUR 15 billion to water management in the 2014-2020 period.

This dataset presents information on EU payments to the ESI Funds programmes as well as to FEAD, IPA-E and ENI supported programmes.
Annual snapshots are provided in the data and therefore the data **must** be filtered by year to have an accurate view of the total EU planned amount and payments made.
Data is reported on cumulative basis, i.e. the amounts shown in 2017 represent the cumulative payments made from the beginning of the programming period (2014-2017 up to date).
The dataset is updated on a daily basis.

***** UPDATE: 3/9/2019 *****
With the release of the June 2019 data on "finances implemented" the Commission also makes a correction to the way it compares planned finances with decided finances (selected) for cohesion policy funds. The total planned amounts include programmes (or priorities) that are expressed either in 1) in public cost only, or 2) in total cost (i.e. including private financing). Some of the programmes expressed in public cost were reporting in finances implemented in "total costs of decided (selected) operations (including private cost)" and in "public cost of decided operations". To more accurately reflect the correct selection rate the Commission now takes only the public cost decided for those "public cost" programmes (or priorities). The correction is applied to all new data published and retroactively. The effect is to reduce the cohesion policy selection rate by -0.7% points for end 2018. The change mainly affects ERDF and programmes in following Member States - BE, BG, IT, MT, PT and RO.
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This data set provides time series information on the financial implementation on the ground of the 530+ ESI Funded programmes. The data is cumulative, i.e. 2016 values included the finances implemented for 2015. Therefore the value for different years **MUST NOT BE AGGREGATED**

The financial implementation data is disaggregated by fund, programme, priority axis, thematic objective and category of regions (where available). The data is provided by the managing authorities of the 530+ programmes on at least an annual basis. For some funds the data is provided more regularly:

For Cohesion Policy funds (ERDF-ESF-YEI-Cohesion Fund) updates are received 3 times a year – on 31 January, 31 July and 31 October - covering cumulative finances implemented to the end of the month preceding submission. After submission the data is published on the platform within 4-6 weeks;
For EAFRD the data on the value of selected projects is reported once a year on 30 June covering cumulative selection up until the previous December; the data on expenditure is taken from the certified expenditure reported quarterly;
For EMFF the data on the value of selected projects and spending is reported once a year on 31 May, and covers the period until the previous December

A detailed description of all the variables in the dataset is provided in the metadata file ESIF_Implemented Finance_Data_Description_of_Dataset_20161219.xlsx (in Attachments below).

Further details on the "finances implemented" data and the other forms of are provided also in the "About" section providing FAQs accessible from the platform - http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/faq/about_open_data/#8

#DYK? climate action is supported with major EU cohesion policy investments

** NEW 2/2021**: new COVID indicators were added linked to support to the vaccination effort.

**NEW 11/2020**: New reserved CV indicator are added to retain the possibility to extend the list.

During 2020, many countries and regions will amend their ERDF and ESF programmes to transfer funds to actions targeting the COVID-19 response. Several programmes have discussed with the Commission their plans to add programmes specific indicators for new actions targeting the COVID-19 response to capture the outputs from expenditure.
In order to exploit programme specific indicators, which could be commonly applied across Member States, the Commission services proposed a voluntary list of such indicators to the Member States on 12 May, to be used when relevant. The use of the unique codes and names will allow the Commission to make use of the monitoring done by the cooperating programmes. A wide use of these codes and indicators would be highly valued for accountability, transparency and communication at the National and EU levels. It the programmes take up these specific indicators the targets will become available later in 2020 with the first annual report on implementation due in May 2021.

NOTE:
1. On 10 July the file was modified to better reflect the possible uses of the ESF indicators as outputs or result indicators (separate columns added for both types).

Greenhouse gases (GHG) are naturally present in the Earth’s atmosphere, but human activity has increased their concentration exponentially since the industrial revolution. Explore the targets set and the progress reported annually under the ERDF common indicator "Estimated annual decrease of GHG" in this data story.

Explore project-level information for 10,000 RTD projects in 17 Member States, representing the majority of the overall EU expenditure (76% / EUR 13 billion).