According to the newspaper El Economista, the more than 14 months that have passed since the government approved its Recovery Plan, backed by European Next Generation aid, is now sufficient time to make an initial assessment of the management of the aid. There is an absence of official statistics on the funds that reached their final recipients. However, a comparison of EU statistics and the most recent statistics from the…
The European Commission plans to issue €50 billion in long-term bonds between January and June 2022, to be complemented by a dozen auctions of short-term bills, to cover the financing needs for the first half of next year under the ‘NextGenerationEU’ recovery fund. So far, Brussels has already raised 71 billion euros to finance the recovery programme.
This approval will allow Spain to receive as early as next month, after Ecofin’s approval, 9 billion euros as an advance on the 69.5 billion requested. (The rest of the NGEU funds allocated to Spain, up to 140 billion euros, are loans and have not been considered for the time being).According to Brussels’ calculations, Spain should receive another 10 billion euros before end-2021, although this delivery will be subject to the fulfilment of almost fifty objectives. After that, Spain will be able to release new tranches every six months, as it meets a series of targets agreed with the European Commission.
The German Constitutional Court has unblocked Germany’s ratification of the Next Generation EU, the €750 billion European recovery fund with which the Union aims to boost the European economy. The German TC has dismissed the appeal lodged by a group of German citizens because it considers that the consequences of the preliminary blockage would be more serious if it were subsequently declared constitutional than if it were to go ahead and eventually be found to be unconstitutional.
Rafael Domenech & Jorge Sicilia (BBVA Research) | The empírical evidence for a large sample of countries at different stages of development since 1960 to the present shows that an increase of 10 percentage points in the ratio of private investment to GDP corresponds to an increase of 3.1 points in the long-term growth rate of per capita income, higher than the elasticity of 2.7 obtained between total investment and growth. The empirical evidence points to private investment being typically allocated more efficiently than public investment, indicating that the best strategy is for public investment to be complementary and incentivize higher private investment.We see this as evidence that the focus of policies oriented to providing fiscal stimulus to incentivize private investment, such as the European Fund NGEU as an adequate strategy to increase per capita income growth in the long term in European economies.
Claudia Canals and Oriol Carreras Baquer (Caixabank)| Given the importance of investment in intangibles for boosting the digital transition, we wonder what impact NGEU will have on this type of investment. To answer this question, first we estimate the average increase in the relative weight of investment in intangibles as a proportion of GDP in Spain between 1995 and 2017. We then measure the impact that NGEU will have on investment in intangibles, considering in the calculation the carry-over effect that this programme could have on private investment.
The EU’s SURE programme, providing loans to help finance short-time work (even retrospectively) is in high demand. The recovery fund “Next Generation EU” was the big deal this summer. But more complicated news may be next, points BoA Global Research. Technical details and national approval processes are not completed and could be the source of less reassuring headlines, explains the firm.
Apolline Menut (AXA Investment) | The Next Generation EU package is a genuine step forward. Joint debt issuance, fiscal transfers and proposed joint tax revenues are politically meaningful. But the package is too small (around 5% of EU GDP) and slow (peaking in 2023-2024) to be a proper cyclicalstabilisation tool.