Brussels is committed to renewing the EU investment program from 2027

The European Comission advocated this Tuesday to renew the investments community InvestEU, which since its launch three years ago has approved financing for more than 170 projects that will mobilize 225,000 million euros for strategic areas.

“Beyond 2027, I believe there are strong arguments for another pan-European program based on a budget guarantee to mobilize private investments in strategic areas,” said the European Commissioner for the Economy, Paolo Gentiloni, at a conference dedicated to this program.

The Italian argued that the InvestEU model “is working”, since having a guarantee from the community budget “helps create synergies between the public and private sectors” and “encourages market actors to look more to the future and take greater risk.” ”, which in turn allows European policies to have greater impact, especially in areas where the market cannot act on its own.

This program, which began rolling out in 2021 with the start of the current EU financial framework, works with a guarantee of 26.2 billion euros from the community budget that guarantees the investments carried out by partner entities, in particular the European Bank of Investments and national promotion banks, such as ICO in the case of Spain.

The objective is that this allows these investors to assume greater risk and, therefore, provide financing to projects that would otherwise have difficulties in the market, with which they plan to mobilize at least 372,000 million euros in public and private investments until 2027, when the current financial framework ends.

As Gentiloni explained today, so far the use of 70% of the budget guarantee has been approved and the green light has been given to 170 projects that will mobilize 225 billion euros in the four areas of action of InvestEU: sustainable infrastructures; research, innovation and digitalization; SMEs and medium-sized companies and social investments.

“But the investment challenges for Europe “They will not end with the conclusion of the Recovery and Resilience Fund in 2026 and Invest EU in 2027. The changing economic and geopolitical environment urges us to increase investment in strategic industries, in energy security, in defense, in the reconstruction of Ukraine,” said the Commissioner for Economy.

In this sense, he recalled that undertaking the ecological and digital transition that Europe needs will require 650,000 million euros in additional investments each year until 2030 and urged to begin reflection on the next multiannual budget of the EU beyond 2027.