Informest, as the mandated body of the Autonomous Region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, within the consortium led by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance (former Ministry of Treasury) and in collaboration with the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Basilicata Region, the Emilia Romagna Region and Piedmont, participated to the project named “Regional Preparatory Programme for the Implementation of Structural Funds Regulations (RPP)”, presented by the Hungarian Government to the European Commission in the framework of the Phare Twinning Programme for technical assistance to the Public Administrations of the Candidate Countries to the EU.

The project particularly consisted in four components:

• regional development;
• programming and management of the Structural Funds;
• capacity building, for the development of entrepreneurship and services to enterprises as well as horizontal themes (public procurement, state aids, environmental sustainability, equal opportunities);
• training structures.

Within this project, Informest was appointed of the co-ordination of one out of the four project components, i.e. Capacity Building. In this position Informest experts dealt with partnership building methodology for projects generation, regional information systems integration, making more of endogenous entrepreneurial resources, public procurement, environment and equal opportunities principles implementation in the SF programming, feasibility studies methodology and the SF information strategy. Tourism as a pattern of territorial integrated approaches to sustainable economical growth has been a pivotal subject in all activities aimed to project generation, entrepreneurial development and absorption capacity enhancement. Special importance was given to the establishment of integrated territorial development initiatives and to the use of state aids for local development purposes in the framework of Structural Funds programming.

Type of service

Institution building and policy advice for Hungarian national and regional bodies managing with the National Development Plan for the implementation of the EU regional policy and Structural Funds programming exercise of the Regional Operational Programme (ROP) in particular.