Assessing the macroeconomic impact of the EIB Group

The Economics Department of the EIB together with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC) carried out an extensive quantitative analysis to evaluate the macroeconomic impact of the investments supported by the EIB Group (EIB and EIF together) within the EU-28. The framework, called RHOMOLO-EIB, capitalises on the well-established RHOMOLO model, initially developed by JRC to evaluate the performance of EU policies, and extends it to cover the business model of the EIB Group. The proposed methodology helps capture both the short and long-term effects of implemented investment projects, exploiting cross-sector synergies and geographical interlinkages. According to RHOMOLO-EIB, overall investment approved by the EIB Group within the EU in 2015-2016 will add 2.3% to GDP and 2.25 million jobs by 2020. The results suggest also that by the same year the EIB Group's loans approved under the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) will add 0.7% to EU GDP and 690 000 jobs alone. These figures represent the additional GDP and employment compared to the baseline scenario describing 2013's steady-state economy. Following extensive sensitivity analysis, the results of RHOMOLO-EIB are found to be robust to reasonable variations in the working assumptions, input data and model specifications.