Special report 07/2025: The European Fund for Strategic Investments. Contributed substantially to addressing the investment gap, but had not fully reached the € 500 billion target in the real economy by the end of 2022

The European Fund for Strategic Investments aimed to tackle the EU investment gap by mobilising €500 billion of additional investments. It supported debt and equity instruments with an EU budgetary guarantee or own resources of the European Investment Bank. We conclude that the programme contributed substantially to addressing the investment gap and supported many different activities from microfinance to large infrastructure investments, but did not fully reach the target of mobilising €500 billion in the real economy by end 2022. We found that the mobilised investment reported was overstated by 26 %, and its additionality was not sufficiently demonstrated. Some important aspects of the programme lacked targets or were not well monitored and reported. We make various recommendations to address these issues.