EU-Wide Advantages & Opportunities – HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-TRANSFO-05

1. Strategic Alignment with EU Policy Agendas

• Directly underpins the European Pillar of Social Rights (fair working conditions, social protection, equal opportunities).

• Feeds evidence into ongoing EU legislation on platform work, minimum wage, bogus self-employment and strengthened social dialogue.

• Supports Digital Europe & AI policy by exploring machine-learning tools to detect undeclared work, while ensuring compliance with the upcoming AI Act.

• Contributes to Just Transition & Green Deal objectives by safeguarding social fairness during twin green-digital transitions.

• Reinforces the EU Anti-Fraud Strategy and Taxation Package through data-driven insights on compulsory payment evasion.

2. Single Market Access & Scaling Impact

• A harmonised evidence base helps Member States coordinate enforcement, reducing regulatory fragmentation that currently raises compliance costs for cross-border employers.

• Standardised policy recommendations foster level-playing-field competition across the EU’s 450+ million-person labour market.

• Results can be plugged into EU Social Security Coordination Regulations and the Internal Market Information System (IMI) for rapid EU-wide uptake.

3. Cross-Border Collaboration & Knowledge Exchange

• RIA consortia must include at least three organisations from three different eligible countries; this enables comparative research across economies with high, medium and low undeclared-work prevalence.

• Access to the European Labour Authority (ELA), EU Platform tackling undeclared work, Eurofound, CESSDA, and European Migration Network ensures immediate dissemination to policy-makers and social partners in all 27 Member States.

• Multinational behavioural and counterfactual experiments generate transferable evaluation blueprints for national labour inspectorates.

4. Regulatory Harmonisation Benefits

• Evidence supports convergence of national definitions of undeclared and under-declared work, easing mutual recognition of labour-inspectorate sanctions.

• Facilitates interoperability of e-verification tools (e.g., electronic work records) across borders, lowering administrative burden for mobile workers and employers alike.

5. Access to Europe’s Innovation Ecosystem

• Full use of EOSC, CESSDA, Eurostat micro-data and emerging Labour Data Spaces accelerates pan-European big-data analytics.

• Collaboration with High-Performance Computing (HPC) centres (EuroHPC JU) enables AI-driven detection models at scale.

• Interaction with Horizon Europe Cluster 4 (Digital, Industry & Space) and EIT Digital widens exploitation opportunities for tech spin-offs (e.g., SaaS solutions for real-time compliance monitoring).

6. Funding Synergies

• Complementarity with ESF+ and Recovery & Resilience Facility reforms on labour market fairness – research outcomes can become ‘flagship reforms’ submitted in National Recovery Plans.

• Interlocks with DIGITAL Europe Programme calls on data-space deployment and GovTech interoperability.

• Provides analytical backbone for InvestEU Social Impact Products targeting financing gaps in worker-protection start-ups.

7. Data, AI & Digital Transformation Opportunities

• Horizon lump-sum model encourages bold data-collection designs (e.g., incentive-compatible list-experiments) without ex-post financial reporting, reducing administrative hurdles.

• Cross-country machine-learning pilots benefit from diverse training datasets (tax, social-security, platform APIs), improving algorithmic robustness and EU-wide scalability.

• FAIR-by-design data outputs become reusable assets for future EU research missions on social inclusion and taxation.

8. Socio-Economic Impact at EU Scale

• Estimated annual revenue loss from undeclared work in the EU (>€300 bn) represents massive recoverable fiscal space for green and social investment.

• Better detection and policy design can raise legitimate employment, reinforcing convergence between Eastern, Southern and Northern labour markets.

• Gender- and migrant-sensitive evidence advances the Union of Equality strategies and supports the demographic-change toolbox.

9. Practical Tips for Applicants

1. Build a consortium that mirrors EU heterogeneity (Nordic, Mediterranean, Central-Eastern, high-migration and platform-economy hotspots).

2. Secure letters of support from ELA liaison offices, Eurofound, cross-border trade-union federations and platform-worker associations to boost policy relevance.

3. Embed a ‘Policy Sandbox’ work package that co-creates pilot interventions with ministries from at least four Member States – a strong asset under the Impact criterion.

4. Plan clustering with ongoing Horizon projects (e.g., Tackling Undeclared Work in the Platform Economy, HORIZON-CL2-2024-TRANSFO-04) to maximise dissemination.

5. Allocate resources for a multilingual Open Science portal ensuring immediate transposition of findings into national administrative guidance.

Bottom line: Operating at EU scale transforms a stand-alone research project into a continental policy accelerator, unlocking economies of scale, regulatory coherence and innovation spill-overs unattainable at the national level.