The Recovery and Resilience Facility: A Springboard for a Renaissance of Public Investments in Europe?

The funds provided by the Recovery and Resilience Facility under the National Recovery Resilience Plans are supposed to finance new projects to supplement, not to supplant national efforts. This is also called additionality which has long been a key principle of the EU cohesion policy. According to this principle EU financial intervention should not substitute for national funding that would have been used in the absence of EU intervention. The purpose of this short contribution is to shed light on the additionality of public investments under the Recovery and Resilience Facility. To this end, the authors propose to look at additionality both from a macro and micro perspective. They apply the micro approach to four national recovery and resilience plans: Italy, Germany, Belgium and Austria.