Theoretical Aspects Regarding Structural And Cohesion Funds Impact Evaluation Methodology

From a theoretical point of view, it can be observed that the European Union financing mechanisms and resources were conceived in the spirit of convergence materialization. However, in practice, the suboptimal absorption of Structural and Cohesion funds is determined by a series of specificities of each Member State. Critics say that European financing rules have created the mold from which the projects are written and implemented only for spending money. But how is the impact of such projects measured? What tools does an evaluator have when assessing the impact of European funded projects? The paper deals with different macroeconomic evaluation stages, in order to better understand the use of specific evaluation methodologies, such as: cost-benefit analysis and its performance indicators, for the evaluation of projects submitted for financing; counterfactual method, for the evaluation of a financing sub-measure or measure integrated in a priority axis of an operational program; macroeconomic models, for the impact forecasting or evaluation on a specific country or a group of countries. For Romania, a specific macroeconomic model HERMIN was studied by various research centres and authors. The cost-benefit analysis became an often used instrument and prerequisite for some operational programs. However, the use of counterfactual method became a premier for Romania in 2015, when there were conducted impact evaluation studies on specific financing measures of the Regional Operational Program 2007-2013. On this multilevel evaluation scale, the authors would say that a realistic assessment lays in the cost-benefit analysis of the project, narrows throughout the counterfactual evaluation of the financing measure and disappears in the over-estimations of the macroeconomic models. We must take into consideration the „with funding” scenario and the „without funding” alternative in order to understand the additionality principle of European funding and to realize that the effects of economic convergence are visible in time.