What is the rate of return to capital in the EU? The question is very relevant when appraising investment projects and can be critical when the country hosting the project faces limited access to international capital markets.

Five students from the London School of Economics’ Master of Public Administration (MPA) tried to answer that question in the framework of a Capstone programme.

Over five months, working very closely with EIB staff involved, the students developed a simple methodology to estimate national rates of return on investment using widely available national accounts data and applied them to four EU countries (Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece). Click here for presentation.

This is the sixth capstone project conducted by the EIB with the students of the LSE’s MPA Programme.

As part of their curriculum, students are required to undertake a consultancy project on a selected topic relevant to a client organisation (a capstone project). A number of international organisations such as the World Bank, EBRD, OECD and the UK Government are regular participants in the MPA capstone programme.