Abstract

This article conducts an empirical investigation, starting by illustrating five investment projects conducted by a number of small-scale Italian companies as the financial values of the contributions obtained by such companies through both the European and Italian Structural Funds, allocated under the EU’s 2014-2020 cohesion policy, have recently been published by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers through the «OpenCoesione» portal. Subsequently, the study aims to examine, in a tendentially critical manner, the published data with regard to the results achieved in financial terms, up to mid-2023, which – according to current European regulations – is the last year of the overall planning period allowing the payment of the resources allocated for financed investment projects. From the simple elaborations that have been conducted, we arrive at results that can be considered not very comforting about the role that EU cohesion policy plays towards Italian SMEs. The main finding is that all the SMEs considered as sample, at six months before the deadline for payment of incurred costs, have not completed their respective investment project yet, and one of them has not even started implementing its project. Nevertheless, it appears that SMEs have already collected most of the public grants provided by the European and Italian Funds to finance the investment projects that were initially approved. Obviously, the actual impact of the investment projects is also less significant than what originally planned