2020 ongoing evaluation of Saarland RDP

Overall, the measures of the Saarland programme RDP 2014-2020 continued to be implemented in 2020, with an increase in scope compared to previous years, and there are persistently high levels of implementation. The level of implementation of all measures at the end of 2020 is 89.8 %.

Overall, it should be noted that 2020 was again a year with lively application behaviour, implementation of projects, and EAFRD support. In 2020, there were an additional 12 cases in agricultural investment support, 2 cases in diversification, 477 “old” and 70 “new” cases in agri-environmental and climate measures, and 14 cases for LEADER.

The EAFRD expenditure, authorisations, and implementation levels of the individual measures up to 2020 are summarised in this publication. In summary, it is possible to state that, due to the comparatively low financial volume and the resulting small case, the outflow of funds is characterised by discontinuities, especially for those measures which have low case numbers but comparatively large amounts of support (in particular concerning the budgeted funds). This also results in a discontinuous effect of the program, partly below the detection limit. The small case numbers allow a statistical evaluation to become less valid. In line with the limited scope of the programme, it has a limited, but easily manageable range of measures. Due to the programme's low budget (and therefore also the technical assistance), it is not possible to set up and operate large measurement networks to test the effects (see also the results of the ex-post evaluation of the previous funding period).