The relief–reform divide: An analysis of national responses to Covid-19 in seven EU member states’ recovery plans

This research paper explores the “recovery divide” in the distribution of funds from Next Generation EU’s the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). The RRF, the central and largest component of the EU’s response to the Covid-19 economic crisis, represents a policy shift by providing aid to all member states with less strict conditionality than previous crises such as the 2008 Great Recession. The paper provides a descriptive overview of the RRF and investigates how the seven largest recipients (France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Spain) prioritize spending the funds. It hypothesizes that ideological orientation and executive type influence whether the extent to which focus on technocratic long-term reforms or politically rewarding short-term relief. A qualitative text analysis of the first national recovery and resilience plans (NRRPs) submitted to the European Commission in 2021 is employed to explore this “relief–reform” dimension, combined with official data from the European Commission and other data sources (Bruegel). Results show that substantial country differences exist, especially in the sectors where the NRRPs pledge intervention. However, EU conditionality still exerts a strong influence, as all NRRPs are consistently reform-oriented and their (minimal) differences are not significantly accounted for by the ideological placement of the executive submitting it.