PhD candidate London School of Economics and Political Sciences
Neil is a Sociology PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he is investigating the proposals for the socialisation of investment in Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, and their failure. He holds a research Masters in History, which looked at the unemployment policy in the British Labour Party in the 1980s and 1990s, and a BA in History and Political Science from a Trinity College Dublin. He was previously also a Vice-President of the Young European Socialists (YES), where he was a founder and coordinator of the YES-IUSY Political Economy Working Group. His strongest academic interests are in questions of political economy and economic policy, with a particular focus on European socialist and social democratic parties, and methods of historical sociology.
How to unlock the European Investment Bank’s potential: four reforms
The European Investment Bank (EIB) is the EU’s multilateral development bank. In this FEPS YAN policy study, the authors suggest four reforms that would help progressive policymakers to utilize unlock the EIB’s potential to play a greater role in the EU economy and its transition to a more resilient, climate-neutral, and progressive economy.
First, the authors suggest the EIB adopts more comprehensive lending targets based on social and environmental criteria. Second, they highlight the need for a stronger focus on equity-like instruments rather than debt instruments, especially in the ongoing response to the Covid-19 crisis. Third, they propose to strengthen the EIB’s accountability towards the European Parliament to ensure a legitimate political direction and democratic control of its activities. Fourth, they propose to convert the EIB’s retained profits into paid-in capital, unlocking up to €110 billion of additional lending capacity. To simultaneously accomplish increased democratic accountability, the authors suggest converting the EIB’s retained profits into EU capital and thus making the EU an EIB shareholder.
Read the paper:
How to unlock the European Investment Bank’s potential: four reforms
Political Mentor: EP Vice President and S&D MEP Pedro Silva Pereira
Academic Mentor: Carlo d' Ippoliti, Associate professor of political economy at the Department of Statistical Sciences of Sapienza University of Rome.
PhD candidate Kingston University London