Faktablad om udtalelsen 

Endeavour to feed the needs of cities and regions into the inter-institutional debate on the extension of the European Fund for Strategic Investments and call for an improved co-ordination between the EFSI and other EU-funded programmes, as well as for finetuning the operation of the EFSI and the European Investment Advisory Hub.

THE EUROPEAN COMMITTEE OF THE REGIONS

- acknowledges that EFSI is a major component of the Investment Plan for Europe and therefore welcomes the principle of its proposed extension in terms of both duration and financial capacity;

- considers also that to make EFSI a bigger success, the synergies with the European Cohesion Policy through the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) should be further clarified and enhanced;

- notes the interdependency between the proposal and the mid-term review of the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and the need for financial resources to be made available within the framework of the mid-term review without undermining existing funding programmes such as Horizon 2020 and the Connecting Europe Facility;

- draws attention to the fact that the extension of the EFSI should not be designed, in the long term, to replace existing EU subsidies;

- points out that the EFSI should be seen as an instrument for addressing forms of market failure and forms of government failure;

- takes note of the issues surrounding the definition of additionality and suggests that the definition be clarified and that the notion of high-risk profile of an operation as a criterion for additionality be refined;

- notes that given the high added value for the European Union of cross-border projects, such projects should automatically be considered to provide additionality;

- reiterates its call for investments made by local and regional authorities financed by the EFSI and the EIB to be excluded from European Union Member States' budget deficit and debt calculations;

- calls on the EIB to provide information on EFSI projects at local and regional level in order to involve local and regional authorities closely in establishing and promoting EFSI projects.