The study aims at providing reliable and robust monitoring data on project, beneficiaries, expenditures and achievement indicators that will feed into the Commission's ex-post evaluation of Cohesion Policy programmes in the 2014-2020 programming period. The work carried out under this contract provides input to the ex-post evaluation in terms of (1) creating interlinked databases of the funded operations and classifying them according to their scope of intervention, form of finance and type of beneficiary; (2) gathering, classifying and assessing the quality of the output indicator data collected by the managing authorities. Under this study, we collected, analysed and synthesised the vast amount of monitoring data available in the national/regional monitoring systems so that it can be processed further and used for later analysis and evaluation work.
The study resulted in the preparation of a “Single Database“ covering 215 programmes (OPs) co-financed by ERDF and/or CF and 73 Interreg cooperation programmes (CPs) co-financed during the 2014-2020 period, across the 12 Thematic Objectives (i.e., 96% of the total number of ERDF/CF programmes). It combines three datasets, including data for
- 584 828 operations (dataset on operations),
- 1 168 711 beneficiaries (dataset on beneficiaries) for 471,419 beneficiary institutions, and
- 1 435 059 indicator values for 421 629 operations (72 % of the operations in 85% of the programmes).
This study was the first attempt to collect, harmonise and aggregate - at an EU level - the data produced by the ERDF/CF project monitoring systems on the basis of national and regional monitoring data. The rich set of data makes available a unique data source on ERDF and CF programmes funded during the 2014-2020 time-period for the ex-post evaluations 2014-2020. Both in terms of granularity and coverage, it expands beyond what is available in public lists of operations, public open data platforms at national level as well as in programme annual implementations reports.