THE STARGATE PROJECT

Strengthening TARgeting and Guidance with Actionable and Timely Evidence for the implementation of the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (STARGATE)

The launch of the ‘Next Generation EU’ program (NGEU) has been accompanied by enthusiasm associated to the potential of such an unprecedented amount of resources activated. Yet, the scientific debate on how to successfully use these resources to foster resilience and economic recovery is limited. 

This project aims to fill this gap by developing an evidence-based framework to inform and guide the implementation of NGEU, with particular reference to the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). Given the similarities between Cohesion Policy and NGEU in terms of aim, governance and territory of intervention, the project will leverage the long experience of the Cohesion Policy as a laboratory to collect evidence on what types of intervention should be funded within NGEU, in which composition and for whom, and with which governance models.

The extensive literature on Cohesion Policy has shown that a series of factors shape the final impacts in different contextual conditions and policy scenarios. The same conditioning factors are likely going to matter for NGEU as well. By analyzing the role they played within the Cohesion Policy framework, the project aims to identify which difficulties might hamper or delay the implementation of NGEU and how they can be mitigated, providing two main contributions:

• POLICY TARGETING:  

Ex-ante identification of recipients to be targeted under the different specific aims of the NRRP in Italy, to be pursued with Machine Learning algorithms for policy-oriented predictive tasks. It will leverage granular data on the past Cohesion Policy projects and on many relevant covariates to forecast project outcomes for each recipient unit, identify the most predictive territorial factors and project-specific characteristics explaining the heterogeneity of project outcomes, and then develop selection criteria for targeting rules and resource allocation.

•  GUIDANCE LAB: 

Translation of scientific evidence into practice, with the provision of a set of actionable configurations for the development of policy pathways (in terms of actions, governance, beneficiaries, territories, modalities, and management procedures) capable of triggering the success of the NRRP.

By reconciling ex-ante (prediction) and ex-post (causal impacts) assessment of public policies at the service of the most important intervention since the establishment of the EU, the project will produce novel scientific evidence with a high level of actionability within the NGEU and Italian NRRP implementation context. This approach can crucially improve NRRP’s implementation, ultimately making sure that the large-scale allocation of resources associated with the program is effective in its main purposes.