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High marks for investment plan creating jobs & growth in Europe

Posted by Nick Prag at 02 June 2016, 22:05 CET |
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The European Commission this week announced it would build on the successful first year of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), extending it beyond 2018.

The EFSI provides a first loss guarantee, so that the European Investment Bank has been able to invest in more projects, sometimes riskier projects, and to invest sooner than without the EFSI.

Overall, the EFSI is already active in 26 Member States and is expected to trigger EUR 100 billion in investment with the approvals given so far. It is on track to mobilise at least EUR 315 bn in additional investments in the real economy by mid-2018.

The Investment Plan has worked and defied the pessimists, says Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, supporting innovative energy projects, healthcare centres, urban development and high-speed broadband.

Close on 150,000 SMEs have access to new financing.

The EFSI has also created a hub which provides advisory services and technical support to project promoters.

And this week saw the launch of a new portal for promoters - the European Investment Project Portal - where they can showcase their projects worldwide to investors.

The EIPP portal offers EU-based private and public project promoters a way of boosting the visibility of their investment projects by simply filling and submitting a project form. The EIPP showcase is intended to investors worldwide, able to reinforce their own pipelines with more European projects.

And the so-called EFSI SME-window is to be scaled up. A success story is the strong interest and participation by intermediary banks across the EU to provide finance to smaller businesses.

EFSI focuses on removing obstacles to investment, providing visibility and technical assistance to investment projects and making smarter use of new and existing financial resources.

All-in-all, it has been a strong response to the sharp reduction of investment across Europe brought about by the economic crisis.


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Nick Prag

Nick Prag

Nick Prag is founder and managing editor of EUbusiness.com. Prior to EUbusiness, he was senior editor at Europe Online SA in Luxembourg, where he played a major part in the launch of Europe Online International.