External publication

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 increa

Publishing date
02 November 2021
Authors
Zsolt Darvas

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.

About the authors

  • Zsolt Darvas

    Zsolt Darvas is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel and part-time Senior Research Fellow at the Corvinus University of Budapest. He joined Bruegel in 2008 as a Visiting Fellow, and became a Research Fellow in 2009 and a Senior Fellow in 2013.

    From 2005 to 2008, he was the Research Advisor of the Argenta Financial Research Group in Budapest. Before that, he worked at the research unit of the Central Bank of Hungary (1994-2005) where he served as Deputy Head.

    Zsolt holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Corvinus University of Budapest where he teaches courses in Econometrics but also at other institutions since 1994. His research interests include macroeconomics, international economics, central banking and time series analysis.

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