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Open Data on Structural Funds at

the European Parliament - The Long
Way Towards Transparency
Luigi Reggi

A study presented at the European Parliament in July 2010 explores the

open data on European Structural Funds made available in March 2009.

The European Transparency Initiative is pushing the transparency agenda

in most EU Countries.

As I wrote in one of my previous posts, European Cohesion Policy is well

on its way towards greater transparency in managing Structural Funds.
Member states and EU Regions are responsible for publishing data on
the beneficiaries of the policy and the corresponding amount of public
funding received.

Although the set of minimum information that the European Commission

and Member States agreed on in the COCOF of 23rd April 2008 is still
relatively small (it only includes the name of the beneficiary, the project
and the amount of public funding), the European Transparency Initiative of
the European Commission certainly represents a breakthrough innovation
in the way most European Countries implement public policy. In the last
few years the policy framework and strict regulation of Structural Funds
have played a crucial role in pushing the transparency agenda in those
areas of Europe where administrative culture and capacity is traditionally
low.

A study on current availability of open data on Structural Funds was

presented at the European Parliament during the public hearing
Transparency in Structural Funds - recipients and beneficiaries held by the
President of the Budget Control Committee, Luigi de Magistris (one of the
aims of the hearing was to learn from the US website Recovery.gov, which

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was presented by Earl E. Devaney, Chairman of the US government’s

Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board).

The report, entitled “The Data Transparency Initiative and its Impact on
Cohesion Policy” (full report), evaluates the implementation of the
European Transparency Initiative by providing some data and four case
studies: Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. The study was carried
out by the Centre for Industrial Studies (CSIL) in Milan, Italy and financed
by the European Parliament's Committee on Regional Development.

As stated in the blog Space for Transparency, the situation reported in the
study results in incomparable, often not machine readable and in some
countries almost unusable data in different EU languages and different
currencies.

The results of the study are indeed not so encouraging. Only 78% of the
European Regions managing an ERDF Operational Programme provide the
minimum information required. 19% provide a description of the

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operations, 41% a location of the projects, 27% the amount of national co-
funding. Moreover, while 44% of EU Regions publish data on the total
amount of funding, only 32% of available datasets specify the
amount of public money actually paid out.
PDF is confirmed as the prevailing format in which data are released

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(52%), followed by XLS (27%) and HTML (21%); a situation that did not
change one year later (March 2010). See the table I included in my post
Open data and structural funds.

As expected, these different approaches seem to reflect differences both in

administrative capacities and cultural administrative traditions. In addition,
the report argues that centralization vs. decentralization issues play also a
role. Obviously, a centrally managed Programme has the advantage that
information flows are easier to manage and local actions are more easily
coordinated.

The report draws some final recommendations:

• to provide additional essential information, such as contact details,
localization, project summaries, description of project partners, etc.
• to make databases fully searchable and compatible, so as to make
possible an EU-wide outlook of the data
• to describe the data in English and not only in the local language

Some personal remarks:

1) The study is the first attempt to evaluate the availability and quality of
open data on Structural Funds provided by a diverse and complex set of
National and Regional Authorities. The statistics provided are a useful
starting point for any further research in the field. Moreover, the report
provides a valuable contextualization and interpretation of
results, along with a detailed description of the European Transparency
Initiative.

2) The analysis dates back to March 2009 and should be updated. Since
then the number of EU Regions providing at least a minimum set of
information has grown and have now reached 100%, as reported in the
map of InfoRegio website; though I guess the indicators on quality have
not significantly improved.

3) The survey, which seems to be conducted starting from the links that
were available on the InfoRegio map at the time, does not consider

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other important types of Operational Programmes such as the National

Programmes and Interregional Programmes or the cross-border co-
operation Programmes.

4) Data on quality of the open datasets are presented only in an aggregate

way, so it is impossible to compare different nations or regions.