The evaluation consists of 15 thematic workpackages. They were prepared by an international expert group. Gábor Balás, director of HÉTFA and project manager Antal Piross contributed to the “Geography of Expenditure” final report, which analysed the geographic distribution of allocated resources of the cohesion policy in every Member State of the European Union.

In their lecture on “The EU Funds for Easing Poverty in Hungary”, they presented the results of the EU Funds evaluation. They argued that the problems of EU Funds aiming at EU cohesion (levy, sustainability issue, too short project periods…) are not the problems of this money, but derive from the general mistakes and project-logic of the 2007-13 funding period of the EU. The difficulty is caused by the fact that that to these mistakes on the fundamentally socio-political field they react in a more sensitive way than on other development fields.

According to their point of view the socio-political integration of EU funds from 2014 gave an important chance to the administration to tackle most of these mistakes. One way can be to establish a task division between the EU and national funds and to finance only those developments from the former that are less sensitive to the project-logic of the utilization of funds. It can largely contribute to the effective decisions if the Ministry establishes an impact assessment system that – beyond the evaluation of former programs – can support the interim decisions of the 2015-2020 period with evidence-based information.

The presentation can be downloaded from here (Hungarian).

Application form: doc

Detailed description of the program: pdf

Plan of the program: pdf

Educational and outcome requirements: pdf

Launching the program, we wish to serve the common aim that Hungary can use the development funds with greater success and efficiency than before. The target group of the educational program is composed of primarily civil servants, public institutions, non-profit organisations and colleagues of enterprises responsible for development programs and projects, as well as stakeholders and policy makers.

Those graduating from the program starting in the fall of 2014 will learn – in a practice-oriented way – the methods relevant to international standards, of public policy analysis, ex post and ex ante program evaluation, as well as impact assessment. The participants will acquire comprehensive and thorough knowledge about the public policy and regulatory processes of the EU and Hungary, as well as the institutional framework of the development policy and its legal environment.

The program on the website of the Károli Gáspár University

The objective of this network of experts is to synthesise evidence on the performance of Cohesion policy in the 2007-2013 period by examining the physical and financial performance of the operational programmes and evaluation and other evidence available. Every year the expert network produces country reports on the achievements of cohesion policy and on a selected theme. All reports look at the physical and financial performance of the operational programmes and analyse evidence coming from evaluations undertaken in the Member States.

Another task of the network is a peer review of selected evaluations. The idea is to encourage the relevant authorities to carry out more and more rigorous evaluations. The review looks both the relevance of the evaluations as well as the techniques applied to produce meaningful and reliable results. A panel of a small number of high-level experts acts as the peers in this process.

Report on the “Job creation as an indicator of outcomes in ERDF programmes” – Hungary, 2013

Country Report on Achievements of Cohesion Policy – Hungary, 2013

Website of the Expert Evaluation Network

Summary of the Research Report in English

The evaluation was carried out by the consortium of Pannon.Analysing Office (Pannon Elemző Iroda), HETFA Center for Analyses (HÉTFA Elemző Központ) and Városkutatás (Metropolitan Research Institute) and commissioned by the National Development Agency. The evaluation was conducted in the second half of 2011.

Summary of the Research Report is available in English

Experts of the HETFA Research Institute and Revita Foundation jointly carried out the evaluation of the 2007-2012 service and infrastructural developments of the cultural institutional framework supporting education between October 2012 and February 2013, upon the commission of the National Development Agency.

Summary of the Research Report in English

The main themes of the evaluation prepared by HETFA were the following:

• Presentation of the context of the projects implemented from 2007 to 2012
• Evaluation of results by institutions and the achievements regarding the whole higher education system
• The sustainability or results
• Explanatory facts for lagging behind planned targets
• Presentation of best practices

In the frame of the evaluation 10 case studies on higher education institutions and three on R&D&I were prepared. These are available in a separate volume additional to the final report.

HETFA Research Institute was commissioned by the National Development Agency (NFÜ) to carry out the evaluation of programmes targeting higher education.

Summary of the Research Report in English

Although the effects of the measures are not assessable since only a short time has passed, nevertheless, according to the case studies the funds had positive effects, such as the increasing popularity of the school, reduction of the drop-out ratio, institutional development of schools, which on the long term may have an impact on the results of the competencies assessment.

Upon the commission of the National Development Agency, experts of HETFA Research Institute Ltd. carried out the evaluation between October 2012 and March 2013.

Summary of the Research Report in English

The evaluation was commissioned by the National Development Agency (NDA) and performed by HETFA Research Institute in the second half of 2012.

Summary of the Research Report in English