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The EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility: an exceptional borrowing instrument?

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journal contribution
posted on 2024-02-05, 09:57 authored by Dermot HodsonDermot Hodson, David Howarth

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) authorises the European Commission to borrow up to €672.5 billion to aid member states’ economic recovery from COVID-19. Some scholars see such funding as unprecedented. Others see a tight link with earlier borrowing instruments. By comparing the EU’s pandemic facility to eleven such instruments created between 1952 and 2021, this article shows that the RRF is familiar in some respects but novel in others. Viewed through a historical institutionalist lens, the RRF shows signs of layering, but limited evidence of displacement or path dependence. Over the last seven decades, member states have added to earlier instruments, we show through process tracing, but they have rarely been locked into institutional choices. The RRF’s strict time limit is consistent with this finding. The RRF will not become permanent, our analysis suggests, but borrowing is now part of the EU’s toolkit.

Funding

Bilateral ESRC/FNR: Banking on Europe

Economic and Social Research Council

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Luxembourg National Research Fund [INTER/UKRI/21/15560511/BankEU]

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

Journal of European Integration

Volume

46

Issue

1

Pages

69 - 87

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acceptance date

2023-07-27

Publication date

2023-08-10

Copyright date

2023

ISSN

0703-6337

eISSN

1477-2280

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Dermot Hodson. Deposit date: 2 August 2023

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