In 2010 ASVAPP has been awarded by a European Commission (DG Regio) grant for “Counterfactual Impact Evaluation of Cohesion Policy. Work Package 1: Examples from Enterprise Support”.
The main goals of the work are: (i) to clarify the methodological problems connected with the estimation of the effects of ERDF investment support on the subsequent performance of beneficiary enterprises; and (ii) to use Italian firm-level data to apply the methods empirically. The following is a brief summary of the main features of the proposed evaluation design:
1) For the analysis of the investment support offered by a large enterprise support program co-funded by the ERDF (Italian law 488/1992) the impact estimates will be aimed at detecting the possible heterogeneity of the program effects across different economic values of the assistance and across different industrial sectors and sizes of the assisted firms;
2) For the analysis of various forms of support to SMEs, focused on one NUTS II region, the analysis will exploit an unique firm-level database on the incentive payments performed by an entire and exhaustive group of (more than twenty) coexisting enterprise support programs provisioned by national and regional laws and by measures of enterprise support assistance co-funded by the ERDF within a former Obj. 2 area.