European Court of Auditors. Special report 21/2025: Recovery and Resilience Facility support for an improved business environment – Only partially addresses country-specific recommendations, but some first results contributed to progress in their implementation

The €650 billion Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) was established in February 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We audited whether RRF measures, in particular reforms, address business environment challenges identified in the country-specific recommendations (CSRs) and achieved the expected results. We found that the RRF partly addresses the business environment challenges with some structural issues remaining unaddressed. While the completed measures have achieved the agreed milestones and targets, so far only one third of them show significant results and contributed to the progress in CSR implementation. We recommend that key challenges are sufficiently covered, a comprehensive framework is put in place to assess results and the contribution of the RRF measures to CSRs, and policy areas are clearly defined and consistently applied across different EU instruments and the European Semester.