Posted: 8 / 12 / 2014
The Connecting Europe Facilities (CEF) is a new tool for financing projects from EU.
With a proposed budget of €50 billion between 2014 and 2020, the Connecting Europe Facility will be a key instrument to promote growth, jobs and competitiveness through targeted infrastructure investment at European level. It will support the development of high-performing, sustainable and efficiently interconnected trans-European networks in the fields of transport, energy and digital services.
CEF investments will plug the gaps that would not be filled if the market, or existing public sector instruments were the only options. It would thus tap into an important potential source of economic growth.
The Connecting Europe Facility will benefit people across all Member States, as it will make travel easier and more sustainable; it will enhance Europe’s energy security while enabling wider use of renewables; and it will help modernise public administration in Europe by bringing more public services on line, a source of immense savings for hard-pressed public budgets.
CEF Digital is anchored to the Europe 2020 Strategy for smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth, which put digital infrastructures at the forefront with the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) initiative. It has a budget of 1.14 billion euros, out of which 170 million euros are for Broadband activities, while 970 million euros are dedicated to Digital Service Infrastructures (DSIs) delivering networked cross-border services for citizens, businesses and public administrations.
The CEF is designed to attract private sector investment to infrastructure through a number of financial risk-sharing instruments, including special lending, guarantees and equity investments. These instruments aim to give credibility to infrastructure projects and to lower their risk profiles. The goal is to offer an alternative to traditional grant funding and to plug financing gaps for strategic infrastructure investments.