The study aims to provide reliable and robust monitoring data that will serve as the basis for the Commission’s ex-post evaluation of cohesion policy programmes co-financed by the ERDF and the Cohesion Fund in the 2014 2020 programming period. The study will exploit, analyse and synthesise the vast amount of monitoring data available in the national/regional monitoring systems to be processed further and used for later analysis and evaluation work. The work carried out under this contract will provide input to the ex-post evaluation by creating a single database of the funded operations and classifying them according to their scope of intervention, form of finance and type of beneficiary and gathering, categorising and quality assessing the output indicator data collected by managing authorities.
The methodology includes interviews with Member States, Managing Authorities and Intermediate Bodies, desk research, analysis of data stored in the DG for Regional and Urban Policy’s databases. The work carried out under this contract will enhance the Commission’s and other stakeholders’ understanding of the programmes’ monitoring systems' functioning and provide an assessment of the data reliability. The study will provide useful input to the Member States and managing authorities to develop and design their monitoring systems for the 2021-2027 period.