Marta Fernández Currás highlights contribution from European funds to economic recovery of Spain

At this forum, she highlighted the tremendous challenge posed by the implementation of the new period of the programme 2014-2020, in that it requires the implementation of the management of the funds aimed at achieving greater efficiency and optimum results.

Marta Fernández Currás stated that this meant preparing a new result-orientated schedule, which was a tremendous challenge for Spain but which showed that it was able to meet the legislative and strategic requirements and that it has sufficient administrative capacity to implement all the actions to receive funding. Furthermore, Spain has managed to focus these funds in a series of demanding priority actions with a great impact in terms of achieving the EU2020 goals, in other words, a more sustainable, smarter and more integrated Europe. She also highlighted Spain's decisive commitment to R&D+i, information and communication technology, priority support for SMEs and the change towards a low-carbon economy.

In this regard, the State Secretary explained that the development of a series of productivity and result-orientated indicators will enable the progress of the programmes financed under the European funds to not only be monitored from a financial point of view but also, and in particular, in terms of their actual impact on society.

She also underlined the coordination and collaboration that prevailed during the whole process of drawing up the operating programmes to be implemented and, after thanking the regional stakeholders for their work, took the opportunity to remind the regional governments of the outstanding challenges to be met under the programme for the period 2007-2013 under which investments can still be made until 31 December 2015.

"The joint efforts at managing the funds have been outstanding and there is no doubt that the significant volume of resources from the European funds has partially contributed to the current economic situation of our country, characterised by an unprecedented clean-up of the public deficit, and a radical reduction in the risk premium with the consequent reduction in interest that must be paid to finance them and the net creation of thousands of jobs".