Banking on Europe: Semi-Structured Interviews, 2022-2024

This three-year project, which was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and the Luxembourg National Research Fund, brought together a team of researchers in the UK and Luxembourg between 2022 and 2025. The project's aim was to generate new knowledge about the evolution and accountability of pan-European borrowers. Institutions with the authority to raise funds on financial markets to provide grants, loans or guarantees were part of the European Communities' early efforts in the 1950s to support the coal and steel sectors and regional development. Such institutions formed key elements of European responses to the economic crises of the 1970s, the reuniting of Europe in the 1990s and the euro crisis in the 2010s, and they were pivotal to the EU's response to COVID-19. The Luxembourg-based European Investment Bank, which has become the world's largest multilateral lender, provided EUR 25 billion in guarantees for European businesses hit by the pandemic. This is in addition to the EUR 750 billion that the European Commission was authorised to borrow to help with the economic costs of COVID-19. As a result of these and other initiatives, the EU started to borrow on the scale of a large state. This data set includes semi-structured interviews with European and member state practitioners about the evolution and accountability of pan-European borrowers.