Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.
Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 863 of 863 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.
Belgium's Federal Planning Bureau, which produces the government's economic forecasts and long-term demographic, ageing, energy and transport outlooks, published 34 publications in 2025 and employed 91 full-time equivalents at the end of the year, down from 96 at the end of 2023, after it stopped replacing departing staff in 2024 to meet savings targets.
91 FTE, staff, full-time equivalents at 31 december, 2025-12-31. 96 FTE, staff, full-time equivalents at 31 december (earlier level, not shown to be a peak), 2023-12-31. Bureau federal du Plan, Rapport d'activite 2025, retrieved 2026-10-02.
The move, and what it needed
A statutory, de facto independent planning bureau receives mandates from government, parliament and social partners, and publishes forecasts and long-term outlooks that the federal budget and pension debates rely on; in a savings drive the government cut its grant and it stopped replacing leavers.
Preconditions
A statute that makes its forecasts the official basis for the budget
Social partners and parliament as co-principals, which protects independence
A core grant large enough to keep long-term modelling teams, which savings measures are now eroding
Limits: The bureau reports on itself; the 91 FTE (80 funded by the federal grant, 11 by contracts) and the hiring freeze are on PDF page 12, the 34 publications on page 19. The 96 FTE is from the 2023 activity report (https://www.plan.be/sites/default/files/documents/OTH_ACTIV_2023_FR.pdf) and the 2024 report gives 94 (https://www.plan.be/sites/default/files/documents/OTH_ACTIV_2024_FR.pdf). The record is filed as operating, not eroded: the fall is five FTE, about 5 percent, from a 2023 level that is not shown to be a peak (earlier reports were not found at the same address), and output held, with 37 publications in 2023, 45 in 2024 and 34 in 2025. The staff trend and the bureau's statement that it no longer replaces leavers to meet savings targets are a documented squeeze on capacity, and a later report showing a deeper loss would justify eroded. Most of the bureau's work is medium-term forecasting and policy costing, not scenario-based strategic foresight; its long-term population, ageing and sustainable development outlooks are the foresight part. The report says nearly 40 percent of staff will retire within ten years, which is a risk stated by the bureau, not a measured loss. The 1959 start is the Act of 23 December 1959 named on the bureau's legal basis page (https://www.plan.be/en/about-us/legal-basis).
Belgium's federal Buildings Agency had the new 440-place prison de Kade in Antwerp, part of the federal prisons masterplan, designed, built and financed by the consortium Hortus Conclusus under a DBFM contract, with works from 2023 to 2026 at a construction cost of EUR 195.5 million and an annual availability fee of EUR 23.1 million for 25 years of maintenance, after which the prison returns to the federal state free of charge.
The federal Buildings Agency tendered a design, build, finance and maintain contract for a new prison, a consortium of an infrastructure investor and contractors built and financed it, and the state pays an annual availability fee for 25 years while the Justice ministry runs the prison.
Preconditions
A federal prisons masterplan with a pipeline of projects to justify the procurement effort
Legal and financial advisers for the agency (here a consortium led by Stibbe)
Domestic contractors and investors able to carry construction and 25-year maintenance risk
Where else it has been used: The same availability-payment structure as the Czech D4 (cze-d4-ppp), applied to social infrastructure instead of a road.
Limits: The page is the contracting agency's own project sheet. It says the prison 'a รฉtรฉ rรฉalisรฉe' under a DBFM contract and that Antwerp 'now has two prisons', but it states the works period as 2023 to 2026 and gives no opening date or planned date, so the record cannot show whether the prison opened on time or on budget; status operating rests on the page's own past tense, updated September 2025. The construction cost and the availability fee are the agency's figures, not an audit; 25 years of fees at EUR 23.1 million in 2023 prices would be about EUR 578 million before indexation (our arithmetic), well above the construction cost, which is the normal shape of a DBFM but means the cost to the state is the fee stream, not the build cost. One project is not a programme: the page places the prison in the federal masterplan for detention and internment, but this record documents only this contract and says nothing about the masterplan's other projects. The consortium's members are named on the page (TINC, Jan De Nul, EEG, with ISS for services).
๐ง๐ชBelgiumsince 2006still operatingbears on University-industry collaboration
The Walloon government labelled 266 collaborative research, development and innovation projects through its six pรดles de compรฉtitivitรฉ over 24 calls from 2006 to June 2018, each needing at least two firms and two distinct research actors, with forecast budgets of 930 million euros, and 126 of those projects had been completed with final payment by early 2019.
The Walloon government funds research only through consortia that pair at least two firms with at least two research actors, labels projects on an international jury's advice, and pays a higher public rate (the pรดle bonus) to projects that pass through a pรดle.
Preconditions
Universities and research centres with laboratories able to take on industrial problems
Firms, SMEs among them, that can co-finance a project and agree intellectual property terms
A regional government with stable research subsidy instruments to top up across many calls
Where else it has been used: The design follows the French pรดles de compรฉtitivitรฉ launched in 2005.
Limits: This is a regional delivery, not a federal one: research and innovation policy is a regional competence in Belgium, and the record covers Wallonia only, not Flanders or Brussels. The figures are read from a PDF (Tableau 2.2, page 18) that IWEPS computed from the administration's SIPOLES project database; they stop at call 24 (June 2018) and are seven years old. The 930 million euros is the sum of forecast project budgets at submission, public and private together, not money spent. A research actor can be a university laboratory, an accredited research centre or a haute รฉcole, so the count is firm-research collaboration of which university collaboration is a part, not all of it. The same report's causal analysis covers only calls 1 to 16 and is cautious about effects on firm performance. The Walloon government's procedure page, updated 30 September 2026, describes a 47th call with a forecast budget of 20 million euros, which is the basis for the operating status; no later project count was found.
BRUGEL, the Brussels-Capital energy regulator, granted derogations from market and tariff rules to energy-sharing pilot projects under article 90 of the Brussels electricity ordinance as amended on 23 July 2018, and states that six such pilot projects started from 2020 until the derogation framework ended when the ordinance of 17 March 2022 entered into force.
The regional energy regulator used a statutory derogation clause to let named energy-sharing projects operate outside market and tariff rules for a limited time and area, studied the results with the grid operator, and the regional parliament then wrote energy sharing into ordinary law.
Preconditions
A statute that lets the regulator set specific market and tariff rules for delimited pilot zones
A distribution system operator able to install smart meters and bill local volumes separately
An EU directive that was going to require a permanent energy-sharing regime, which gave the pilots a rule to inform
Where else it has been used: Flanders recognised Thor Park in Genk as a regulatory-free zone for energy in 2020, and Wallonia's regulator authorises pilot projects under its own decree; the three Belgian regions run separate regimes for the same purpose.
Limits: The count is of pilot projects, not of firms: the participants are energy communities, a business incubator, a social housing building and co-ownership associations, with the distribution system operator Sibelga metering each one. The regulator reports on its own programme. The number is read from a PDF: the regulator's cover note (page 4) says six projects started, while the consultant's annex in the same file (page 21) describes five, so the figure is uncertain by one. The study is a consultation draft dated 25 April 2023. Six projects in about two years in a region of about 1.2 million people is a small flow, and the framework covered energy sharing and the connection of decentralised production only. The derogations ran for two years, some with an extension, and the source does not say how each project exited. The framework ended because the 2022 ordinance transposed the EU directives and put energy sharing into ordinary rules, so its end is a rule change and not a documented failure. It covers one region: the Flemish regulatory-free zone for energy (Thor Park, recognised 2020) and the Walloon pilot projects under article 27 of the electricity decree are separate regimes that this number does not include.
Belgium's National Employment Office treated every COVID-19 work stoppage as temporary unemployment for force majeure and paid allowances to 939,532 workers for March 2020 and 1,117,133 for April, when 1,221,412 workers, 35.3 percent of private and contractual employees, were declared temporarily unemployed; almost 1.4 million received at least one payment during 2020.
The employment office widened an existing rule, temporary unemployment for force majeure, to cover every corona stoppage and simplified the employer procedure, so firms could suspend contracts without proving economic grounds and existing payment bodies paid workers within the month.
Preconditions
A standing temporary unemployment regime with electronic social risk declarations from employers
Payment bodies, including trade union funds, already paying unemployment benefits
A legal concept (force majeure) broad enough to be reinterpreted by the administration
Where else it has been used: France's activitรฉ partielle (fra-activite-partielle) followed the same route of stretching an industrial instrument to the whole economy; Belgium's version paid workers directly rather than reimbursing employers.
Limits: The monthly counts and the 35.3 percent share are on the ONEM press page; the 1.4 million for 2020 and the monthly average of 504,657 are on the annual report page (https://www.onem.be/espace-presse/rapport-annuel-onem-2020). The press page gives no date for the rule change itself, so the record shows speed only as payment for the first month of the crisis, not as days from shock to rule. ONEM does not pay most allowances itself: the payment bodies (the trade union funds CSC, FGTB and CGSLB, and the public fund CAPAC) do, and the press page splits the amounts between them. The 35.3 percent is computed on 3,458,136 salaried employees excluding civil servants. A worker counted in April was unemployed for 14 days on average, and only 20 percent for the whole month, so the head count overstates lost hours. The cost was large: ONEM's annual report records EUR 4.042 billion of extra temporary unemployment spending in 2020. ONEM later ran controls on corona temporary unemployment; their results are not reflected here.
๐ง๐ชBelgiumsince 2006dismantledbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery
The Federal Public Service Public Health held a strategic stock of masks for pandemic influenza in military warehouses in Namur from 2006, sized at 32 million surgical masks when the Bioethics Committee reviewed the pandemic plan in 2009. It destroyed the expired masks in operations in late 2015 and late 2018 without replacing them, so Belgium entered the COVID-19 crisis in early 2020 with no strategic mask stock.
From 2006 the federal health administration stored a national reserve of masks under its pandemic plan, then destroyed expired stock in 2015 and 2018 without a replacement contract, so the reserve ran down to nothing between two pandemics.
Preconditions
A pandemic plan that names a stock size but no owner for rotating and replacing it
Storage borrowed from another department (Defence), with conditions that degraded the stock
Limits: The zero is not a counted figure. It is our reading of the committee's prose statement that no strategic mask stock existed when the crisis began. The 32 million is the stock named in the 2009 bioethics advice and the plan's target; the report never gives an audited count of masks actually held in any year. Some of the stock was probably unusable before it was destroyed: the report records that the Namur warehouses lost their heating in 2012 and the masks stayed in unheated storage. The dates of destruction (late 2015 and late 2018) come from a chronology entry built from hearing testimony, which the committee marks as contradicted by other witnesses, not from a finding of its own. Responsibility for the decision not to replace the stock is disputed in the report itself between the former health minister and the experts heard. A mask stock is one narrow input to pandemic preparedness. It says nothing about the pandemic plan, testing, hospital surge capacity or the later rebuilding of a stock.
๐ง๐ชBelgiumsince 2017still operatingbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery
The National Crisis Centre of the Federal Public Service Interior has run BE-Alert, the national system that lets municipalities and provinces alert the population by SMS, including location-based SMS, and information screens, since 2017. By 1 September 2025, 537 of 565 municipalities, covering 95 percent of Belgian territory, were affiliated, 1,369,659 citizen addresses were registered, and the system had been used 273 times in 2025.
The federal crisis centre built one national alerting platform and offered it to municipalities and provinces, which keep the legal power to warn. It added channels over time (registered SMS, location-based SMS, screens) and runs an annual national test.
Preconditions
Emergency-planning powers held by mayors and governors, so a federal tool needs local uptake to work
Mobile operators obliged or willing to send location-based messages
A federal budget for a platform that municipalities can join voluntarily
Limits: This is the crisis centre's own news release, not a statistic or an audit. Affiliation means a municipality can send alerts, not that it does so well or in time: the release gives no measure of how fast or how accurately any alert reached people in a real emergency. The 273 uses in 2025 mix real alerts, vigilance messages and tests, and the release does not split them. One person can register up to five addresses, so the count is not people. Location-based SMS reaches unregistered phones, but this page gives no reach figure for it. Coverage took eight years to reach 95 percent of territory, and 28 Walloon municipalities were still outside it in 2025. The page says nothing about the July 2021 floods in Wallonia, the largest recent test of national warning, so it cannot show that the system works when a major shock arrives. A warning channel is one part of preparedness and says nothing about recovery.
Belgium's federal state and three regions agreed in 2001 to fund the infrastructure for a regional express rail network around Brussels through the RER Fund, with every work due by the end of 2012. The Court of Audit told the Chamber in February 2017 that the cost of the works charged to the fund had risen by more than 27 percent over 2001 to 2016, that all but one project ran six to 17.5 years late, that the works were largely at a standstill and that full four-tracking of lines 124 and 161 had been postponed with no date.
The federal state and the three regions ring-fenced a closed envelope for RER works in a cooperation agreement, paid it into a fund managed by the railway holding company, and left the infrastructure manager Infrabel to build four-track upgrades on existing lines under permits issued separately by each region.
Preconditions
A cooperation agreement binding the federal state and all three regions, which the 2003 convention needed three years to ratify
A rail spending key splitting investment 60/40 between Flanders and Wallonia each year, which slowed works when one region's sites stalled
Regional permitting and appeal routes, where a single annulled permit stops a line that crosses three regions
Where else it has been used: The Court noted that building section by section, which the mobility minister proposed in 2016, could have been planned from the start and might have reduced the delays.
Limits: The figures are the Court of Audit's own, but they are read from the Chamber's transcript of the auditors presenting their report, not from the report itself, which sits on the Court's website behind bot protection; the transcript is a PDF whose text a plain download is refused, though it opens in a browser. The 27 percent is the Court's cost growth for the fund as a whole, which an auditor says is understated, because the least advanced projects (lines 124 and 161) show the smallest increases only because most of their cost is still to come; individual items rose far more, 53 percent for Watermael-Schuman-Josaphat and 100 percent for stations and car parks. Part of the increase is indexation and part is a financing effect that Infrabel puts at just under 200 million euros, which is Infrabel's calculation rather than the Court's. The minimum shortfall of 800 million euros to finish the works in the pipeline is in current euros and is also called a floor. The delays are attributed to late regional permits, repeated appeals (three Brussels permits for line 124 were annulled by the Council of State on language law grounds), the 60/40 regional spending key and the suspension of the 2013 to 2025 investment plan, so much of the loss lies in Belgium's multi-level permitting and budget rules rather than in project management. The figures date from early 2017. What happened after, including later federal funding and the phased reopening of sections, was not verified at an official source here, so the record documents the stall and the abandoned 2012 target, not the final outturn. The 2003 RER convention's service targets were themselves replaced in 2012 by a less ambitious intermediate scenario adopted only at ministerial level. The started year is the cooperation agreement that set the fund up, not the first construction contract.
๐ง๐ชBelgiumsince 1994operating below its peakbears on Large project delivery
Belgium extended electronic voting after a 1991 trial in two cantons until 44 percent of the electorate voted on machines in 1999, when 22 percent of polling stations in Wallonia were equipped; the Walloon Parliament abolished automated voting for French-speaking communes by a decree of 9 March 2017, the Constitutional Court rejected a challenge in September 2018, and the FPS Interior now lists the 252 communes in Wallonia as voting on paper while 152 Flemish, all 19 Brussels and the nine German-speaking communes vote electronically.
A 1994 federal law let the government designate volunteer communes for machine voting, so coverage grew where communes asked for it. After regionalisation of local elections, the Walloon Parliament used its competence to abolish the system for French-speaking communes, and the Constitutional Court upheld that choice.
Preconditions
A federal law that allowed machine voting commune by commune rather than imposing it nationally
Regional competence over local elections, which let one region exit without the others
A paper ballot that every polling station could still run
Limits: The two numbers are in different units and come from different publishers, so the loss cannot be read as one falling series. The 1999 figures, 44 percent of the national electorate and 22 percent of Walloon polling stations, come from a comparative study by the French Senate (Lรฉgislation comparรฉe LC 176, 2007), read from a PDF. The FPS Interior pages for paper and electronic voting carry no date and no electorate figures; their commune counts match the municipal map after the 2024 local elections, which is why the record dates them 2024, and the current national share of voters on machines is not published there. The decree and its date are taken from Constitutional Court judgment 115/2018. The loss is regional: Brussels, the German-speaking communes and about half of the Flemish communes still vote electronically, and 49 percent of Flemish polling stations were equipped in 1999, so the national system eroded rather than ended. Wallonia had never equipped more than a minority of its polling stations.