Measuring national reform ambition under the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility: AI-assisted coding of structural reforms in 27 national plans

This paper measures and compares reform ambition in national Recovery and Resilience plans (RRPs). Drawing on political economy and public policy literature, the paper conceptualises reform ambition on three dimensions: (1) capacity, (2) governance, and (3) commitment. Using automation of Large Language Models, the paper codes all 2,187 reforms across 27 national plans, analysing detailed reform milestones and targets. Furthermore, the paper uses the congruence method and descriptive statistics to assess the match between national reform ambition and theory-derived expectations regarding envelope size, administrative capacity, and the CSR implementation. The paper’s contribution is two-fold. First, it provides an operationalizable concept of “structural reforms” which can be used to gauge reform ambition and direction at both European and national levels. Second, to our knowledge, this is the first comparative account of RRF reform ambition across all 27 national plans. As such, it offers valuable lessons for the design of money-for-reforms conditionality in future EU funding frameworks, including the proposed European Fund.