The interactive map provides an overview of projects co-financed by EU funds and implemented in the Slovak Republic (SR) during two programming periods (PPs):
Only projects whose implementation statuses indicated that they had entered the implementation phase under the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) and had contributed, at least partially, to the achievement of the objectives of the relevant OP were included:
Conversely, the following project statuses were not included because they represent projects that were ultimately not implemented with ESIF support or were only partially implemented but did not contribute to the objectives of the relevant OP. If a project did not contribute to the OP objectives, the beneficiary was obliged to repay the full amount of the non-repayable financial contribution (NFC) provided. Projects whose implementation had been suspended were also excluded:
Excluded (Non-compliant) project statuses:
As a second step, only projects for which actual drawdown of the NFC had been recorded were included, i.e. projects for which both the amount drawn down from the EU contribution and from the State Budget contribution were greater than zero. Projects for which no drawdown was reported (i.e., the amount was zero or not recorded) were excluded as they would not provide any relevant information on financial implementation. This approach ensured that the subsequent visualisation included only projects that were actually carried out with EU support and for which financial implementation had taken place.
The user selects the type of territorial unit (municipalities, districts, regions), for which the relevant projects are displayed visually on the map and in detail in the accompanying table. Clicking on a marker on the map opens an information window containing summary data on the drawdown of financial resources and irregularities. The table provides detailed information on individual projects, with each row representing one place of implementation. As a project may be implemented at several locations, all places of implementation are displayed in a separate list after the user clicks on the project name. If the project has no additional places of implementation, the message “No data available in table” is displayed.
For the lowest territorial type (municipalities), a colour scale based on a logarithmic sequence was used to ensure a balanced visual representation while taking account of extreme values in the number of projects implemented.
Data on projects co-financed by EU funds originate from several administrative sources established during different programming periods and using different information systems. As each programming period covered a different set of data fields and each data provider (APA, MIRRI SR/ITMS II, ITMS 2014+) applied its own data and record logic, the underlying datasets differed in scope, level of detail and quality.
For the 2007 – 2013 programming period, the APA data contained only amounts financed from the EU and the State Budget contributions. Data on beneficiaries' own contributions and information on irregularities were not available. Information on project status was also entirely absent for this period. For the period 2014 onwards, the financial data were more comprehensive but still did not include beneficiaries' own contributions. These contributions therefore had to be calculated as the difference between total project expenditure (drawdown) and the EU and the State Budget contributions. Information on irregularities was not included in the APA data. Moreover, the available project-status data provided only a broad classification, without more detailed status categories.
The ITMS II export (MIRRI SR) did not contain information on irregularities. These data were therefore supplemented using a dataset provided by the Certifying Authority of the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic. Data on own resources (beneficiaries' own contributions) were also missing from the export and were subsequently supplemented using our own ITMS II export and additional data requested from MIRRI SR. Furthermore, the dataset provided by MIRRI SR was incomplete, as projects under the Fisheries Operational Programme were not included. The available data also contained fewer project-status categories than those available in later programming periods. In the case of operations terminated early (under extraordinary circumstances), it was not possible to determine whether they had contributed to the project objectives or whether the funds provided had to be repaid. Consequently, these projects could not be classified unambiguously.
In addition to differences in financial data, the quality and format of data on places of implementation also vary significantly across data sources.
For places of implementation obtained from ITMS, only technical standardisation of the text was carried out to enable the data to be linked to the territorial reference database and map layers.
APA data contain incomplete or abbreviated municipality names, spelling variants and errors, several locations combined in a single field, as well as territorial designations that do not correspond to administrative municipalities, such as settlements, cadastral areas or local parts of municipalities. Some of these inaccuracies and local designations already appear in APA grant agreements on the provision of NFC. A specific feature of projects in the agricultural and forestry sectors is that they often relate to particular parts of a municipality or to local geographical names that do not have official administrative status. Many such names occur repeatedly in different regions and may therefore be ambiguous, making it impossible to assign them automatically to a specific municipality.
For these reasons, extensive data cleaning was carried out, including the correction and standardisation of text, removal of technical characters and completion of official municipality names based on the municipality reference database. For general entries such as “entire region” or “districts of the Košice region”, the location was deliberately not assigned to a lower territorial level and remained at the regional level. In many cases, the location had to be supplemented or specified manually on the basis of the contracts, especially for cadastral areas, historical, ambiguous or local place names, and records where location information was entirely missing.
Each project may have one or more places of implementation at different territorial levels (municipality, district, region). Some projects could be localised only at district level, others only at regional level. Precise information at the municipality level was not always available, reflecting the nature and quality of the original project data. In the dataset, a project is divided into multiple rows, with each row representing a place of implementation at the most detailed territorial level available. A single project may therefore appear in several rows where it has multiple places of implementation.
Financial data - including the EU contribution, the State Budget contribution and beneficiaries' own contributions (own resources) - were available to us only at the level of the project as a whole, rather than at the level of individual locations. Consequently, project expenditure is not allocated among municipalities, districts or regions, and the available data does not allow the amount actually invested in each specific location to be determined.
Each row relating to the same project therefore contains identical financial values; these represent the aggregated drawdown (total financial implementation) of the project, not amounts attributable to individual places of implementation. Location data are used primarily for the geographical presentation and project search and should not be interpreted as representing the territorial distribution of financial flows.
Projects are financed through a combination of three sources:
An irregularity is a breach of applicable EU or national rules resulting from an act or omission which has, or would have, the effect of prejudicing the EU budget by charging an unjustified item of expenditure to it. It represents the amount of NFC resources that the beneficiary is obliged to return.
Based on the available data, it is not possible to distinguish between:
The resulting map dataset and table represent a technically harmonised and partially interpreted version of administrative data adjusted to make individual projects comparable, analytically usable and suitable for cartographic visualisation.
List of abbreviations of OPs:
| OP | Abbreviation | Programming period |
|---|---|---|
| OP Information Society | OPIS | 2007–2013 |
| OP Competitiveness and Economic Growth | OPCaEG | 2007–2013 |
| OP Research and Development | OPRaD | 2007–2013 |
| OP Education | OPE | 2007–2013 |
| OP Environment | OPEn | 2007–2013 |
| OP Bratislava Region | OPBR | 2007–2013 |
| OP Transport | OPT | 2007–2013 |
| OP Technical Assistance | OPTA | 2007–2013 |
| OP Employment and Social Inclusion | OPEaSI | 2007–2013 |
| OP Healthcare | OPH | 2007–2013 |
| Rural Development Programme 2007–2013 | RDP | 2007–2013 |
| Regional Operational Programme | ROP | 2007–2013 |
| Integrated Regional Operational Programme | IROP | 2014–2020 |
| Interreg V-A Slovak Republic – Czech Republic 2014–2020 | Interreg SK–CZ | 2014–2020 |
| Interreg V-A Slovak Republic – Austria | Interreg SK–AT | 2014–2020 |
| OP Additional Contribution 2014–2020 | OPAC | 2014–2020 |
| OP Effective Public Administration | OPEPA | 2014–2020 |
| OP Integrated Infrastructure | OPII | 2014–2020 |
| OP Quality of Environment | OPQoE | 2014–2020 |
| OP Human Resources | OPHR | 2014–2020 |
| OP Fisheries 2014–2020 | OPF | 2014–2020 |
| OP Technical Assistance | OPTA | 2014–2020 |
| Rural Development Programme 2014–2022 | RDP | 2014–2020 |
(source: ITMS, Agricultural Paying Agency)