2024-04-13 12:52:19
20 years have passed since Latvia joined the European Union (EU) – what is your assessment, what are the benefits of Latvia’s membership in the EU, including in the context of the possibility of receiving co-financing from EU funds for the implementation of various projects. Does the obtained result correspond to what was previously hoped for?
Speaking of Latvia’s 20 years in the EU, this is really a very broad spectrum with significant benefits – we can definitely talk about both security issues and the overall development and prosperity of society, including our economy. From the FM’s point of view, one of the most important benefits (which we also talked about when we became an EU member state in 2004) is the opportunity to participate in the use of support offered by EU funds, or cohesion policy, which is the largest EU solidarity policy. In other words, this means that all citizens in Europe can use more equal opportunities and use the socio-economic processes offered by the common EU market, thus improving their quality of life, this EU cohesion policy offers Europe’s less wealthy regions – and undeniably both Latvia and our neighbors Estonia and Lithuania at the time of accession, the EU was among such regions – funding or public investments to make such less wealthy regions richer.
Since joining the EU, Latvia has made a very significant financial contribution directly in the context of public investments, and in total, in these 20 years, we have received around 18 billion euros from EU funds. This has allowed us to implement more than 14,000 different projects within the framework of cohesion policy alone – from the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund, the Cohesion Fund, the Just Transition Fund, and there are many other financial instruments, as well as in recent years from the Recovery Fund.
If we talk about total investments, of course, our own public funds investments in these investment projects should also be added to them, which on average is around 20% of the project’s total costs. Therefore, the total amount of investments is greater than the amount we have received directly from the EU.
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2024-04-13 12:52:19