SETI (2005 - 2006) |
| Study on Strategic Evaluation on Transport Investment Priorities under Structural and Cohesion funds for the Programming Period 2007-2013 |
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The recent enlargement of the EU to 25 Member States clearly creates a new challenge for its Cohesion Policy. Disparity levels within the EU have increased substantially and will further increase with the accession of Bulgaria and Romania. This is an explicit point of attention as the Treaty states that, in order to strengthen its economic and social cohesion, the Community shall aim at reducing the disparities between the levels of development of the regions and the backwardness of the least favoured regions. This objective lies at the core of the Commission’s regional policy.
One of the key elements of the cohesion policy of the Commission is the contribution of the development of new transport infrastructure to regional economic development. Extensive spending has taken place in this domain under ERDF, Cohesion Fund and ISPA.
One of the prominent initiatives in the European Union in this respect is the development of the Trans-European transport networks (TEN-T). In 2003 the Commission has identified 30 priority projects of the TEN-T up to 2020. The priority projects include the most important infrastructures for international traffic, bearing in mind the general objectives of the cohesion of the continent of Europe, modal balance, interoperability and the reduction of bottlenecks.
For the new programming period 2007-2013 the Commission seeks to strengthen the strategic dimension of cohesion policy to ensure that Community priorities are better integrated into national and regional development programmes. In accordance with the draft Council Regulation (article 23), the Council establishes Community Strategic Guidelines for cohesion policy to “give effect to the priorities of the Community with a view to promote balanced, harmonious and sustainable development”.
To assess the impact of these transport projects the Commission has indicated that evaluations on a strategic level should be undertaken. The evaluation conducted in SETI should then be seen as one of these specific strategic evaluations. The strategic evaluation should feed in the process of determining transport investment priorities and the preparation of the national strategic reference frameworks and operational programmes. As such, it should serve to enhance the quality, effectiveness and consistency of fund assistance.
The strategic evaluation is directed to the transport sector. Three specific objectives have been formulated for this strategic evaluation:
- To provide an analysis of the situation in selected fields relevant to transport, using structural indicators across Member States, plus Romania and Bulgaria;
- To assess the contribution of Structural and Cohesion funds relative to the current and previous programming periods and draw lessons of relevance for the purpose of the study in terms of identification of potential shortcomings in the development of transport priority projects that might have hampered the utilization of those funds or their expected benefits;
- To identify and evaluate needs in the selected fields and identify potential transport infrastructure investment priorities of structural and cohesion funds for the programming period 2007-2013.
The tasks assigned to RRG in SETI are as follows:
- Implementation of various model scenarios into GIS database;
- validity check of the defined scenarion;
- adjustment of existing software tools for the scenario processing;
- test and provision of the model scenario in specific file formats for further processing;
- scenario documentation / generation of maps;
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