What are PERTEs?

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PERTE stands for Proyectos Estratégicos para la Recuperación y Transformación Económica (Strategic Projects for Economic Recovery and Transformation). The PERTE were articulated almost two years ago through Royal Decree Law 36/2020, of December 30, which included the approval of urgent measures for the modernization of the Public Administration and for the execution of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, created in turn as a key instrument for the reception of the Next Generation funds from the European Union.

This is a new figure that promotes public-private collaboration in the development of innovative projects, with a great transversality between Public Administrations, and in which both large companies and SMEs can participate. The Government of Spain explains that "with the designation as "PERTE" a project or activity is identified as "key for the future of the economy"".

It is therefore a very innovative concept, destined to generate a great impact in terms of employment and improvement of the competitiveness of the Spanish economy by promoting highly innovative and transformative projects for the economy and society as a whole.

In order to declare a PERTE, two main criteria are required: the first is that it contributes to Spanish economic growth and job creation through a combination of "knowledge, experience, resources and actors to remedy market failures and/or social challenges that could not be addressed otherwise", and that it also has "innovative character and added value in R&D&I". The second major requirement to obtain the PERTE label is that the project is of quantitative or qualitative importance, understood as "involving a high technological or financial risk", or that it contributes to "integration and growth of small and medium-sized enterprises", or that it encompasses "projects with disruptive and ambitious research and innovation phases, beyond the state of the art in the sector, followed by a first industrial deployment".

The declaration as PERTE is subject to approval by the Council of Ministers, from where each project is approved individually. The first of these, approved in the middle of last year, was the PERTE for the electric and connected vehicle, with an estimated investment of more than 24,000 million euros in the period 2021-2023 and an estimated contribution of between 1% and 1.7% to GDP growth in Spain.

For the time being, the Government has already given the green light to eleven strategic projects with an estimated investment of more than 30 billion euros. They are clearly focused on sustainability, as they intervene in areas ranging from the circular economy or renewable energies to the digitalization of the water cycle, but also seek to generate impact and help recover production in areas where economic activity had slowed down due to the pandemic, as is the case of PERTE for the naval industry, the agri-food PERTE or the aerospace PERTE.

The Government has set up a website where PERTEs can be advertised and the registry of those already approved can be consulted. It is also possible to consult the most frequently asked questions and answers about PERTE.