The planning of public investments in EU Member States : long-term strategy, selection & budgeting issues

Leveraging insights from the academic literature, this paper discusses the challenges and practical solutions in the planning of public investment projects and illustrates them with survey evidence from the EU Member States. The paper starts with strategic planning, which covers a 10-to-20-year planning horizon and can help to identify shared rather than competing goals across sectors and regions. It then moves to the appraisal and selection of large investment projects and discusses the benefits of multiple decision gates and external quality assurances. Finally, it outlines budgeting tools such as multi-annual commitment appropriations and multi-annual budgeting of capital and maintenance costs that bring clarity on the available resources and protect availability of capital during and beyond implementation. Each of these three stages is supported with available evidence from the EU Member States, which helps to identify good practices but also hints at areas for improvement. Overall, the analysis suggests there is much room for improvement across the EU in the early stages of planning as well as in terms of the use of long-term budgeting tools.