Failure or success: assessing the European Commission’s new strategy to foster EU’s economic recovery

Abstract

The European Commission launched in November 2014 an Investment Plan for Europe to foster Europe’s economic recovery. Despite prognosis of failure, in 2016 Juncker announced the success of the Plan and proposed its extension. Using as theoretical framework an adaptation of Bovens and ‘t Hart’s model of two logics of policy evaluation (political and programmatic) (1996; 2016), our goal is to answer the question: Is the Investment plan truly a success as claimed by the Commission? Our findings suggest that although the Plan scored fairly poorly as the reputation goes, the perception is gradually improving over time. In terms of performance, most of the numbers are in line with, or above, the expected results for the timeframe of the analysis.