Using innovative financial instruments provides an alternative to traditional financing, through grants, associated with the EU budget, and can also provide a significant flow of new funds for strategic investments. A key advantage of innovative financial instruments is that they create a multiplying effect on EU’s budget, by facilitating and attracting other public and private funds to projects of interest for the EU.
There is potential for a broader utilization of those instruments with the support of a wide range of policies. For more than 10 years, EU’s budget uses financial instruments such as the guarantees and the investments in SMEs shares.
These instruments have been successful, but they have been elaborated ad hoc and experimentally. Consequently, as part of the future financial perspective for 2014-2020, the Commission proposes the introduction of a simplified and standardized approach on the utilization of new financial instruments, in order to contribute to guaranteeing that EU funds are used in the most efficient way possible to support EU policies.
The Commission proposes a new type of instrument, the initiative on EU’s bonds for developing projects that would be used for guaranteeing the investment resources for the infrastructure projects of vital European strategic interest.
The Community of Railway and Infrastructure Companies, CER, believes that the future TEN-T policy should, as one of its main priorities, promote the use of energy-efficient and environmentally friendly modes of transport in order to help meet Europe’s goals of reducing transport related CO2 emissions. In this context, CER is pleased that the report underlines “the need to shift freight and passenger flows towards more sustainable and efficient transport flows” in line with the objectives outlined in the European Commission’s Transport White Paper.
“Adequate infrastructure financing is of vital importance for rail in order to be able to deliver services of high quality. This is an issue of even bigger concern for Central and Eastern Europe where rail infrastructure has already been seriously underfinanced for the last 10 years”, declared Johannes Ludewig, CER Executive Director.
Financial instruments will be part of the EU’s budget interventions in several policy areas, especially in those that aim at building infrastructures by using public-private partnership schemes in order to reinforce competitiveness and sustainable development in EU’s transport sectors.
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