ABSTRACT: Despite its being the world´s most important financial institution as regards volumes of loans since the 1990s, there is a significant lack of scholarship on the European Investment Bank. This project aims to rectify this by analyzing to what extent the European Investment Bank fulfilled one of its central objectives: reducing poverty in Europe´s least developed regions between 1960 and 2012, as stated in its Statutes, annexed to the 1957 Treaty of Rome.
In order to check this using econometric techniques, I compiled an original database manually transcribing the entire annual loans then extracted dependent and independent variables from diverse primary sources. Results show the European Investment Bank did not contribute systematically to reducing differences between Member States, though it did accomplish this in sub-periods of time, at least, until 1973. Since that date, the European Investment Bank prioritized other objectives, outside those in its Statutes.
