Like the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the bottom-up component of the fiscal capacity would allow Member States to identify and deliver key investments that contribute to providing European public goods with financial support from the EU. This should be done according to clear criteria and monitoring at EU level.
The top-down component of the fiscal capacity could instead support large-scale, cross-border European initiatives for infrastructure, research and innovation. [27] This would be consistent with the approach in the United States, where most public research and development funding is financed at federal level through institutions such as the National Science Foundation.