EUROKYPIA Project Summary

Objectives

The objectives of this project are the following:

• (i) serving the Lisbon goals, gathering a critical research mass of centres of excellence, around a model framework research environment interlinking policy areas, skills, officials, administrators, groups and countries;
• (ii) supporting EU Governance, according to the five principles of openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence;
• (iii) Develop needed policy impact analysis tools and address key EU and IST 2002 Work Programme concerns, by bringing together technology developments and EU policy areas, such as 'enterprise policy, in particular in favour of SMEs; coherence and competition within the single market, employment and social inclusion policies';
• (iv) Developing a 'vision' and a 'roadmap' and prepare the ground for a future FP6 project based on a framework of excellence and EU wide co-operation, by involving in a common effort NSIs (information); IT enterprises and communities (technologies); Academia and research institutions (best methods, tools and models); and government departments and other organisations that require policy impact evaluation.

Description of work

The work is shaped around the four groups of technical expertise which participate to the project, i.e. NSIs, Academia, Research Institutions, and IT and consulting firms. Correspondingly:

• the first component bears on the information that is needed to support the Lisbon Objectives and New Governance in the social, business cycles and economic-structural/market definition, and is carried out by NSIs.
• the second component bears on the support that can come from New Technologies and how these can help. The ITs group in the network will take responsibility for this activity. The perspective is forward-looking. The focus is not on how technology can help in doing the same, but faster. It is on technology and innovation how IT can help to get more, better and faster information to support policy making.
• the third component bears on the more broader scientific, analytical and general aspects of policy and socio-economic analysis. The perspective is on the soundness and strength of the analytical tools that are used for policy impact analysis, on their properties and coherence between indicators and what they are supposed to measure. Since the New economy is accompanied by structural changes, this group will also study how the latter affect indicators, functional relationships and if the actually serve to measure systemic (or socio-economic textures) strength and weakness and performance. Universities in the Academia group of the network will take responsibility for this activity.
• the fourth component envisages existing tools and methods in a perspective which is "applied", that is focused on what needs to be done to support policy making using existing techniques. Under this activity, the members in the "Research" group of the network will explore "frontier" tools and methods that already exist and how they can be developed within a period that spans over the medium term. Opportunities will be charted, including the obstacles (which may be associated to technology or data problems) that may exist and hinder their development and EU-wide use.

Milestones and expected results

the project permits to advance specifically in three areas: (i) assessment of the state of the art with respect to information, technologies, methods and tools for policy impact analysis needed for the developing a new governance at the EU level, benchmarking the European situation compared to the US; (ii) Feasibility studies for implementing community wide micro-simulation models, decomposable indicators and socio-economic maps; (iii) Development of a 'vision' and a 'roadmap' for future thematic research, based on the co-operation of centres of excellence.