Belgium – Banking and investment services – Econometric Study on the implementation and performance of the EFSD+ Open Access Window in ENEST-MENA countries and options for MFF 2028-2034

The finality of the study is to appraise the market value, relevance, and effectiveness of IFI financial products paid via EFSD/EFSD+ contracts, and their impact compared to a no-EU intervention scenario. The main differences between this study and traditional FwC studies consists in: 1) Collecting evidence of the legal and financial impact that EFSD/EFSD+ contracts have on IFIs’ contracts with their clients and partner financial intermediaries (rather than collecting opinions that people with a direct stake in these contracts have of such impact); 2) Reliance on independently collected technical financial data, to be further elaborated via inferential statistics (rather than reliance on anecdotal surveys / interviews); 3) Assessing these contracts by benchmarking the financial products on which they are based against similar financial products - debt, guarantee and equity products - financed or managed by other governmental, no-profit or for-profit private market players (rather than benchmarking against financial products contained in other EU contracts, or no benchmarking at all); 4) Contracting consultants normally dealing with the banking and non-banking financial sectors (rather than consultants normally dealing with the Official Development Assistance - ODA - sector). This would mark a clean departure from EC studies that have traditionally focused on contract analysis by way of desk reviews (with an implicit comparison to other EU contracts and FwC studies on these EU contracts) and interviews / surveys among directly interested parties (including staff of the Contracting Authority; staff of IFIs / PFIs or other EU-contracted Parties and; Direct/Indirect Beneficiaries). Given the originality of the study (of a technical and comparative nature, with substantial inputs expected from the contracted party already in the study design phase); the type of expertise required (statistical tools applied to finance and microeconomics) and; the expected costs (likely EUR 700 K), the best option to contract such study would be through the “competitive dialogue” procedure regulated by Art. 2.6.7 PRAG. “In the case of particularly complex contracts, where the contracting authority considers that neither direct use of the open procedure nor the arrangements governing the restricted procedure will result in the best value for money, it may use the competitive dialogue. A contract is considered to be ‘particularly complex’ if the contracting authority is objectively unable either to specify the technical means of satisfying its needs or objectives or to specify the legal or financial makeup of the project”. The contract will target financial consultancy companies specializing on financial instruments, financial intermediaries and financial market data.