EU seeks elusive funding on road to recovery

Repeated warnings

Gentiloni, the European Commissioner for Economy, has repeatedly warned of an uneven recovery possibly leading to splits among EU member states, posing a threat to the single market and the eurozone.

"That is why it is so important that the Next Generation EU proposal seeks to avoid distortions in the single market, and divergences, especially in the euro area," he told a news conference on Thursday.

Italy is expected to be the largest beneficiary of the recovery fund, receiving 172.7 billion euros out of the total of 750 billion euros. This allocation would comprise 81 billion euros in grants and 91 billion euros in loans.

Spain and Poland will follow, receiving 140 billion euros and 53 billion euros, respectively.

Zsolt Darvas, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a think tank based in Brussels, said that because of the hurdles in designing, approving and implementing EU programs, less than 25 percent of the grants planned under the recovery fund is expected to be spent in the next two and a half years, when such needs will be greatest.

"Well-functioning financial markets can help bridge the gap between urgent spending needs and late-arriving EU disbursements, but more effort is needed to frontload EU payments," he posted on the Bruegel website on June 10.

In a post on the Politico website last week, Eoin Drea, a senior research officer at the Wilfried Martens Center for European Studies in Brussels, stated that the European Commission is right in saying that the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus crisis requires an EU-level response.

"But the scramble toward a more centralized, more deeply integrated EU risks setting the bloc up for failure," he warned.

One important aspect of EU recovery is reopening internal borders for member states, which rushed to close them in mid-March when the pandemic hit Italy and spread across Europe.

Most EU states belong to the 26-member Schengen Area, a passport-free zone set up in 1990 under the Schengen Agreement, which was signed on June 14, 1985.

On Thursday, the European Commission said it was recommending that Schengen Area states lift internal border controls by Monday this week and was calling on EU countries to open frontiers to travelers from outside the bloc from July 1.

European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, said, "International travel is key for tourism and business, and for family and friends reconnecting.

"While we will all have to remain careful, the time has come to make concrete preparations for lifting restrictions with countries whose health situation is similar to the EU's and for resuming visa operations."

On Thursday, the latest risk assessment by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control showed that Poland and Sweden are the only EU countries where COVID-19 has yet to reach its peak.

Italy, the EU nation worst-hit by the disease in recent months, opened its borders on June 3 to citizens from the EU, the Schengen Area and the United Kingdom. Travelers from these countries do not have to undergo quarantine unless they have visited other nations in the two weeks before arriving in Italy.