The EIB Investment Survey

THE EIB INVESTMENT SURVEY

Being able to track changes in business and infrastructure investment, identify investment needs and understand the constraints that hold investment back, is vital for effective policy making to support growth and job creation across Europe. The annual EIB Group Survey on Investment and Investment Finance (EIBIS) will help address this challenge.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) is the bank of the European Union. It is owned by the EU Member States and represents their interests, working closely with other EU institutions to implement EU policy, supporting investment by firms and the public sector throughout the EU and around the world. The EIB Group is made up of the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund (EIF).

Ipsos has been commissioned by the EIB to implement the EIB Investment Survey. The survey consists of yearly waves. This year’s survey will be carried out by telephone by Ipsos from April 2025 to June 2025. All published findings will be completely anonymised.

The survey includes one module:

The main Investment Module targets 12,800 SMEs and larger corporates across the EU and the US.

More information for participants on the Investment Module

THE INVESTMENT MODULE

What drives business investment in the EU? What holds it back?

The main module of the survey involves interviews with 12,800 SMEs and larger corporates across the EU and the US:

It collects data on firm characteristics and performance, past investment activities and future plans, sources of finance, financing issues and other challenges that businesses face.
It is designed to be representative across different sectors, firm sizes and all EU Member States and the US.
It is designed to build a panel of robust and comparable firm data to enable the analysis of investment and business environment trends over time.
It will be used to inform policy dialogue on the drivers and barriers to investment and to support better policy making on how to support business at both the national and EU levels.

Who is invited to take part?

Panel respondents: Participants who took part in the previous wave of the survey in 2024 and provided their permission to be contacted again.

New respondents: Businesses with five employees or more from the non-financial corporate sector across the member states of the European Union and the US have been selected at random. Within these businesses, we are inviting the senior person who is best able to talk about his or her company’s investments.

Selected businesses are active in the economic categories listed under point C to J in the NACE database.

Preparing for the survey

To help you select the right person in your organisation to participate, and prepare for the interview, we have created a pre-interview questions sheet. Other participants have told us it is helpful to see these questions in advance.

Download the pre-interview questions

What reassurances can we give about the survey?

We would like to reassure those taking part in the survey that:

All interviews will be conducted within the ESOMAR (The World Association of Research Professionals) Market Research Code of Conduct. This means that everything you say will be treated in confidence and your answers will only be reported at the aggregate level together with all the other organisations taking part.
Your survey data will be linked to publicly available company data, meaning any existing data from commercial databases such as Moody’s ORBIS or data from websites such as those from the OECD, Eurostat, the European Commission or your company website, but your confidentiality will be maintained in the published results.
We would still like to speak to you even if you have not had any issues with accessing finance, to help us ensure that our findings are representative of all organisations.
Aggregate, anonymised findings from the survey will be published in order to help businesses like yours.

If you have any doubt or would like more information about the survey, please contact David Burdon (david.burdon@ronin.com) /Elisa Colombo (elisa.colombo@ronin.com) at Ronin or the European Investment Bank (eibis@eib.org).