An Assessment of Post-COVID-19 EU Recovery Funds and the Distribution of Them among Member States

María-Dolores Guillamón, Ana-María Ríos and Bernardino Benito ()
Additional contact information
María-Dolores Guillamón: Department of Accounting and Finance, University of Murcia, 30100 Murcia, Spain
Ana-María Ríos: Department of Political Science, Social Anthropology and Public Finance, University of Murcia, 30100 Murcia, Spain

JRFM, 2021, vol. 14, issue 11, 1-11

Abstract: The European Commission has launched numerous recovery plans for Member States to try to mitigate the damage caused by COVID-19. The most important element of this program is the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), which is worth EUR 672.5 billion in loans and grants. Seventy per cent of the RRF grants will be distributed between 2021 and 2022, with the remaining 30 per cent in 2023. The allocation of grants for the period 2021–2022 has been made according to different socioeconomic criteria. In this context, the aim of our work is to assess the recovery policies jointly developed by EU countries and to analyze which of the criteria adopted for the allocation of the grants included in the RRF for the period 2021–2022 has been most decisive in the distribution of these funds. In addition, we also examine whether other health indicators directly related to the pandemic can also be related to the amount of funding that EU countries will receive in this period by carrying out regression analysis. Our results show that the countries that will receive more RRF grants are those with larger populations, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and higher unemployment rates. Furthermore, it is noted that health criteria, as well as those of a socioeconomic nature, may be relevant in the allocation of recovery funds. In this way, our results can be the start of a debate in the literature on whether the socioeconomic criteria adopted in the distribution of these funds have been appropriate. or whether other criteria, such as those of a health nature, should have been taken into account.

Keywords: recovery funds; COVID-19; European countries; allocation criteria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C E F2 F3 G (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/14/11/549/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/14/11/549/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jjrfmx:v:14:y:2021:i:11:p:549-:d:678581

Access Statistics for this article

JRFM is currently edited by Ms. Chelthy Cheng

More articles in JRFM from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().