EU Cohesion Policy Performance: Measures and Regional Variation

• Main Author: Rosina Moreno
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: AECR 2020-04-01
• Series: Investigaciones Regionales - Journal of Regional Research
• Online Access: https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/IR/article/view/71041

The main objective of this paper is to describe the performance of the EU Cohesion Policy in terms of EU funds effectiveness. The effectiveness in the absorption of funds is a permanent challenge for EU member states, and therefore, the analysis of the absorption capacity is needed in its different spheres: its scope, its determinants and its effects. The present paper deals with the first one, the scope of the absorption of EU resources and focus on an aspect that has been widely forgotten so far: the regional variation in the absorption of the structural funds. Based on EU regional aggregate data on funds commitment and absorption provided by the European Commission for the Operating Program 2007-2013 at the NUTS2 level, we observe thatfull absorption was more the exception than the rule, with an important regional variation. In addition, we offer a discussion on how lack of timely available regional data on EU fund payments hinders the analysis of the effectiveness of the regional absorption of the funds.