- Funding Programme
TSI 2026 flagship – Technical support for the implementation of country-specific recommendations
The European Semester provides every year a detailed analysis of the economic and social challenges that each Member State faces. Based on that analysis, the country-specific recommendations invite Member States to address these challenges with particular reforms and investments. Deriving from a rigorous prioritisation exercise, they set out the main challenges each Member State should address. Endorsed by the European Council and adopted by the Council, they benefit from a high degree of consensus.
When preparing their requests for technical support, Member States are strongly encouraged to focus on the areas identified in the CSRs. The projects responding to the requests should help Member States address technically difficult-to-implement CSRs targeting highest implementation needs and challenges.
Depending on the specific issues identified for the different Member States, the TSI can provide technical support in all thematic areas covered by the European Semester, for example:
Green
Increase renewables and enhance energy infrastructure, improve climate adaptation, environment and resource resilience, accelerate the decarbonisation of the transport sector.
Digital / single market
Improve business environment, including policies for small and medium-sized enterprises, address restrictions to competition, accelerate innovation, advance digital and data driven public administration with a focus on greater inter-operability including between Member States.
Social / health / education
Support curriculum reforms and increase the quality, inclusiveness and availability of the education and training systems, including VET, devise active labour market policies to reach out vulnerable groups, reinforce the social protection and pension systems and develop integrated approaches to fight poverty, support digitalisation of services and digital upskilling, improve quality and sustainability of healthcare systems with increased support to primary care and long-term care.
Fiscal / financial
Improve budgetary planning and execution, foster the quality of public spending through spending reviews and budgetary performance management, implement tax administration reforms specifically towards digitalisation and simplification, design and implement tax policy reforms improving the tax mix and broadening tax bases, implement capital markets reforms aimed at facilitating access to finance.
Institutional resilience
Improve effectiveness and user focus of public/judicial administrations and help reduce administrative burdens also for citizens by implementing the once-only principle at all levels of governance.
Furthermore, national authorities can ask for support for reforms aimed at addressing CSRs linked to unlocking investments by promoting the efficient absorption and mobilisation of public and private funding. In this cases, technical support will target authorities involved in the process of planning, allocating and deploying investments, as well as of addressing barriers to capital markets development.
Support can be provided to national authorities to implement crucial reforms to improve their public investment management (PIM) frameworks, unlock public and private investments through increased use of financial instruments (FIs), streamline public procurement and permitting processes to accelerate investments, and facilitate the mobilisation of private savings towards transformative investments, for example by proposing policy options (e.g. on tax-incentives, investments regulatory frameworks.
Furthermore, under this flagship national authorities can also ask for support for reforms aimed at addressing CSRs related to the implementation of EU law and simplification. As highlighted in the Draghi and Letta reports, the accumulation of rules over time at different levels have increased complexity and challenges in implementing the rules, undermining Europe’s competitiveness. The Commission is committed to simplifying and improving EU policies and laws, as well as to make rules easier and faster to implement.
Support measures aiming at implementation of EU law and simplification would include, among others: streamlining the regulatory framework and legislation at national level, ensuring legal certainty and clarity while avoiding unnecessary gold-plating; designing and adapting governance structures to improve coordination and reduce fragmentation, including through establishing new entities or strengthening of existing ones; enhancing monitoring and evaluation, improving data collection and interoperability, and strengthening independent oversight and accountability mechanisms to ensure effective tracking of progress and transparency; strengthening public administration capacity and sharing of good practices.
