European Fund for Strategic Investments – EFSI 2.0

Briefing 15-02-2018

On 14 September 2016, the Commission proposed an extension of the duration of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) until end-2020, and the introduction of technical enhancements for that fund and the European Investment Advisory Hub. Under the new regulation, (EFSI 2.0), steps are taken to increase support for small-scale projects; Parliament can send a (non-voting) expert to EFSI’s steering board, and EFSI’s scoreboard will be publicly available after a project is signed. The increase in the financial allocation needed to deliver the higher investment targeted will come from an increase in the EU budget guarantee from €16 billion to €26 billion, and an increase in the EIB contribution from €5 billion to €7.5 billion. However, the provisioning rate for the guarantee is reduced to 35 %, giving a total contribution from the EU budget of €9.1 billion, compared to an initial contribution of €8 billion. Parliament managed to reduce the share of this increased contribution financed via redeployments from the Connecting Europe Facility programme, by instead drawing more heavily on EFSI-assigned revenues and investment reflows. The agreed text was adopted on 12 December 2017.