Follow Up Study on the Economic Benefits of ITER and BA projects to EU Industry

Description

The subject matter of the contract is to produce a study on the impact (job, creation, economic benefits and spin-offs/spill-overs/synergies) of the ITER project activities in the EU with an in depth analysis of the global added value and the impact on Europe’s global competitiveness of EU’s involvement in fusion activities through ITER. The Study will follow up and complement a previous study completed in 2018, which covered the period 2008-2017. The European Domestic Agency Fusion for Energy (F4E) has operated since 2007, and it is therefore appropriate to evaluate the effect of F4E’s operation on the European economy, in terms of economic impact and job creation. A first analysis to this effect was carried out in 2018 through an external contractor, with the temporal scope of 2008 — mid-2017. The Study under the present tender should follow-up and develop on that earlier analysis, refining the methodology and incorporating additional data while extending the analysis to the two years that have elapsed since the first analysis. The aim of the Study is to build on the results of the previous work to achieve 3 main objectives: — update the study to reflect the 2 years that have passed, and on that basis, investigate and assess the accuracy of the previous study’s forecasts, — complement the previous study as appropriate. In particular, the previous study was only able to estimate the extent that IO contracted EU companies, as this information was not available from IO. For this Study, access to this information will be provided by IO. On the other hand, the previous study included contracts that had registered offices in the EU but whose main headquarters, and in some cases the location where the work was performed, was located outside the EU. For this Study, the contractor should take care to follow-up on contractors with multiple offices, and only include contracts that were carried out within the EU, — for the previous analysis, the E3ME macroeconometric model was used to find the impact of spending on ITER in terms of Gross Value Added and job years created. In the Study the usage of a different model would be beneficial but not mandatory. If the contractor uses a different model, a reanalysis of the data falling under the scope of the previous study should be performed. This will enable an understanding of how sensitive the results are to the modelling methodology. If the two models output very different results for the same data, this discrepancy should be investigated.