Effectiveness – the criterion of assessing investments co-financed from the European Union budget
Whenever public money is spent, it is necessary to evaluate the undertaken efforts. First of all, these assessments must be comparable, which implies the need to prepare and implement common procedures for each financing source. The European Commission uses a basic scheme for evaluating the effects of public intervention based on the product – result – impact model in which immediate and long-term intervention effects are assessed by selected criteria: utility, efficiency, effectiveness, relevance and sustainability.
This seemingly simple evaluation scheme generates in practice a lot of interpretation and application difficulties, which, in its turn, limits the comparability of achieved assessment outcomes (evaluation outcomes).
This paper aims to describe basic issues connected with public intervention assessment (based on the product-result-impact model). The author focuses on the effectiveness criterion as one of the basic criteria for the assessment of investments co-financed from the European Union budget and surveys its definitions present in European guidelines and used by other international institutions engaged in project evaluation.
The paper primarily attempts to estimate the degree of difference and discrepancy in defining effectiveness and the impact of this on the reliability of public intervention assessment.

Effectiveness – the criterion of assessing investments co-financed from the European Union budget
Whenever public money is spent, it is necessary to evaluate the undertaken efforts. First of all, these assessments must be comparable, which implies the need to prepare and implement common procedures for each financing source. The European Commission uses a basic scheme for evaluating the effects of public intervention based on the product – result – impact model in which immediate and long-term intervention effects are assessed by selected criteria: utility, efficiency, effectiveness, relevance and sustainability.
This seemingly simple evaluation scheme generates in practice a lot of interpretation and application difficulties, which, in its turn, limits the comparability of achieved assessment outcomes (evaluation outcomes).
This paper aims to describe basic issues connected with public intervention assessment (based on the product-result-impact model). The author focuses on the effectiveness criterion as one of the basic criteria for the assessment of investments co-financed from the European Union budget and surveys its definitions present in European guidelines and used by other international institutions engaged in project evaluation.
The paper primarily attempts to estimate the degree of difference and discrepancy in defining effectiveness and the impact of this on the reliability of public intervention assessment.