Development of Schemes for Regional Development Programmes

Period of implementation: 12.2004 – 09.2005

Country –  Romania

Beneficiary – Ministry of European Integration

Objective:
The main objective of the project is to improve institutional capacity in order to effectively program, manage and implement EU Structural Funds after Romania will access the EU in 2007.
The specific objective is to support the Department of Regional Policies and Programs (DRPP) within the Regional Development Directorate at the Ministry of European Integration (MEI) in programming the structural funds, including preparing the Regional Operational Programme (ROP) and Programme Complement (PC) and dealing with the external ex-ante evaluation process.

Activities:

Activities of Component 1 – Evaluation of Phare 2000 ESC and MARR Fund:

• Review relevant documents (i.e. Guidelines for Applicants, projects technical reports, projects monitoring and evaluation) related to ESC Phare 2000 & MARR Fund and set up a framework to conduct the ex-post evaluation
• Review relevance and establish efficiency, effectiveness, impact and sustainability of Phare ESC program & MARR Fund
• Elaborate and send out questionnaires to grant beneficiaries
• Organize site visits at grant beneficiaries in the view of analyzing implementation of grant activities in accordance with the funding applications; Organize interviews with national and local stakeholders
• Elaborate the ex-post evaluation report and launch it in a final seminar for both Phare ESC and MARR Fund (one-day each)

Activities of Component 2 – Carry out support analytical and research studies to inform ROP:

• Assessment of statistical data for business environment and tourism niches
• Review data collection, processing and dissemination methods
• Define a methodological framework to be used for further analytical studies
• Conduct the analytical study applicable for business environment and tourism niches
• Carry out a study on the business environment at regional level by:
• identifying business support structures needs at regional level
• defining a project pipeline for providing support to business structures
• Carry out a surveys
• on tourism potential in selected niche markets identified: agro-tourism, spa tourism and cultural tourism by:
• analyzing marketing and communication strategy from the niche regions
• analyzing industry competitors, power of suppliers, power of buyers, substitute, new entrants, complementors
• Organize and deliver training on how to carry out and use results from the research studies

 Activities of Component 3 – Direct assistance for ROP preparation:

• Review of the 8 Regional Development Plans (RDPs) and issue recommendations regarding improvements required
• Define the basic measures and priorities of the future ROP on NUTS II regions and draft the strategy for designing the ROP
• Organize and deliver a seminar to present conclusions and recommendations from review of current RDPs, regional/sectoral studies and draft ROP
• Develop cost benchmarks by: identifying cluster lists of projects per fields of intervention/type of measures; calculating average costs per measures; setting up a database of cost benchmarks to be used for ROP;