Analysis Regarding The Instruments For Impact Evaluation Of European Funds Across Practitioners

The programming period 2007-2013 has come to an end in all EU Member States, the date of 31st March 2017 representing the deadline for sending the final balance of payments on European Structural and Cohesion Funds. Beginning with 2015, the European Commission has launched several reports on impact evaluation of the cohesion policy and its objectives (convergence, regional development and employment, European territorial cooperation); the evaluation instruments are diversifying and there is observed quite a contradiction between different approaches of European Commission’s general directorates (DGs): some use macroeconomic models, like Hermin, Quest III or Rhomolo, some use the counterfactual evaluation and some use the econometric methods. Consequently, several authors and practitioners have written interesting articles in standing for an evaluation method or another; the results of their simulations being also contradictory, but the magnitude of conducting impact evaluations at local, regional or national level denotes the difficulty of assessing the efficiency of Structural and Cohesion Funds. The paper proposes an analysis of the official results of the European Commission in relation to the main categories of impact evaluation instruments and some considerations on the private initiatives in this field of interest. It can be affirmed that most of these studies are seeking answers to the basic questions of any evaluation design: besides the “traditional causal question”, there are other 4 impact evaluation questions: “to what extent can a specific net impact be attributed to the intervention?; did the intervention make a difference?; how has the intervention made a difference?; will the intervention work elsewhere?” (Department for International Development, 2012: 36-48).There is also needed to make a difference between micro and macro approaches regarding impact evaluation: the micro studies have an informal structure, a high level of disaggregation, a weak use of theories, a judgemental model calibration, an implicit policy impact and an ignored treatment of externalities; on the opposite side, the macro studies have a formal structure, a low level of disaggregation, a strong use of theories, a scientific model calibration, an explicit policy impact and an explicit treatment of externalities (Bradley et al, 2005:7). In the modern practice of evaluation, there can be observed 3 philosophies, according to Tavistock Institute (2003: 21-22): positivism (accepts objective knowledge), constructivism (rejects objective knowledge) and realism (concentrates on interconnections).