Europe needs growth and to unblock the critical situation and create jobs, there is a need for more – and above all better – investments in infrastructure. It is estimated that between now and 2020 European countries will have to invest 2.000 billion more than planned and another 15.000 billion up to 2030, to tackle climate change, the rising age of the population and for the replacement of existing infrastructures which will result obsolete.
Says the Chatam House, the second most important Think Tank in the world - and the first non-American - in a report entitled Building Growth in Europe: innovative financing for infrastructure, literally Building growth in Europe: innovative finance for infrastructure. Already from the opening of the report it is clear how the goal of economic growth at the European level necessarily passes from greater attention to the problems related to the construction of infrastructures at the European level.
However, the financial crisis has made the situation more complicated, drastically reducing the portion of GDP dedicated to infrastructure: in England, for example, this decreased from 21,3% in the pre-2007 period to 17,3% in 2013. The The work of the Chatam House refers to an implementation of efforts for those infrastructures no longer aimed at within the relative national borders of the EU member countries, but at what the report calls pan-European, because they involve resources, materials and manpower from different countries of the Union. To finance European projects, more Europe is needed, therefore the burden of the costs of the selected projects will have to be divided between the European Union and the member countries, with policies aimed at ever greater inter-state cooperation in an ever more supranational perspective.
In examining which are the ways to incentivize investment in infrastructure, central importance is given to the method of selecting the projects to be financed. These will have to be those with a transnational dimension, a high technological intensity and, obviously, the criterion of economic return is a fundamental distinction. To achieve this, Chatam House recommends the creation of a European Infrastructure Agency to be responsible for coordinating and fostering a pan-European infrastructure strategy.
More specifically, the report hopes for ever greater collaboration between the private and public sectors, avoiding isolating this or that project to one or the other. The public sector, for example, will have to play a central role in the initial stages of project implementation. Alongside encouraging the creation of public-private partnerships, the Think Tank report explains how to find the resources. Facilitating access to long-term investment funds is essential, and will need to be on the agenda of those parties that were elected in the recent votes for the European Parliament. Finally, the resources are to be found both in the European Investment Bank and in the national credit and development institutes – such as the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti in Italy and the French Caisse des Depots et Consignations.
In short, the intentions of the Chatam House are to materially build the Europe of the immediate future. To do this, we need to get out of the danger of chronic economic stagnation, possible only thanks to more effective and effective collaboration - political and economic - between the states of the European Union.
