BGI Consulting in cooperation with dr. John Bradley (EMDS) commisioned by the Ministry of Economy of Lithuania has created a macroeconomic model HERLIT-16 and carried out mid-term evaluation of cohesion policy measures administred by the ministry. The evaluation comprised three main components – (1) the development of the monitoring system of economy and sectors, (2) creation of the econometric macro model for the evaluation of public policy intervention – HERLIT-16 and (3) mid-term evaluation exercise of the measures being administered by the Ministry of Economy and financed by the EU structural and national funds.
The monitoring system was developed and documented in stand-alone report. It is important to note that the monitoring system, developed in accordance with technical specification of the MoE, focuses on monitoring indicators of the economy and separate sectors which are in the competence area of the MoE. The indicators of the monitoring system are grouped in two main groups – the first one comprises economic indicators and sectoral indicators and, the second one, includes specific indicators which reflects key competence areas of the MoE, i.e. Research & Development, Business and Business Environment, Tourism and Energetics. These indicators were further used to create a macro economic model and to carry out the mid-term evaluation exercise.
The Macroeconomic model HERLIT-16 was designed to fulfil the need of evaluation of public policy interventions and was practically applied for the implementation of the evaluation tasks set by the MoE. HERLIT-16 is a macroeconomic model designed to analyse and evaluate mid-term and long-term impacts of the cohesion policy. This model is based on the same principles as the HERMIN model being used by the European Commission. The design of HERLIT-16 is grounded on the key features of the economic structures. The Lithuanian economy is disaggregated into 16 separate economic sectors what allows in-depth analysis of interventions and to tally economic sectors with the administrative areas of the MoE.
The scope of the mid-term evaluation of the measures administered by the Ministry of Economy and financed by the EU structural and national funds covers 38 measures implemented under the Operational Programmes of Economic Growth and Cohesion Promotion. For the need of the evaluation the measures were grouped according to the competence areas of MoE (Research & Development, Business and Business Environment, Tourism and Energetics). The total planned allocation for the MoE measures is 8 335 million Litas. This allocation is comprised of the EC funding (5 463 million Litas), national domestic funding (404 million Litas) and private funding (2 468 million Litas). The distribution of the funds for the administrative areas of the MoE is as following: 19.1 per cent for R&D, 33,8 per cent for Business and Business Environment, 15,1 per cent for Tourism and 32 per cent for Energetics. The scope of the evaluation also included alternative scenario of the distribution of the allocation for the MoE measures.
The main task of the mid-term evaluation was to assess the relevance and impact of the measures in the light of fluctuating macroeconomic and sectoral situation, to suggest changes in the current measures or propose new ones. The tasks of the evaluation were specified by the evaluation questions which were solved by grouping them according to the structural components and criteria of the evaluation. The main evaluation criteria invoked for the evaluation were relevance, effectiveness and impact.
The evaluation results, conclusions and recommendations can be found in the final evaluation report and summary.
Final evaluation report (Lithuanian)
Evaluation summary (English)