ABSTRACT. This paper deals with the topic of monetary support of the European Union cohesion policy to two Central European countries the Czech Republic and Poland. The main area of the interest is the spatial dispersion of said resources among regions of each country as it is related to special intervention areas that were delimited in both of them. The idea behind this delimitation is rather similar in both countries, targeting the economically less advanced areas. The results of virtually the same approach, however, are quite different as they are obtained through different implementation of cohesion policy. Poland is rather more successful in targeting economically weakest regions as the government prepared an architecture of operational programmes that allocates significant amount to the economically weak Eastern Poland ex-ante through regional and multiregional operational programmes. The Czech government, lacking similar approach, is far less efficient in targeting economically weak regions. What both countries have in common is the worrying trend to invest prevalently into basic infrastructure in these regions and implementing projects with larger added value in economically sounder areas.

The paper deals with the issue of managing structural funds in Zlínský and Trenčiansky Regions on the Czech-Slovakian border with the focus on success of targeting funds to local entrepreneurs, especially small and medium ones. An expansive dataset was used to evaluate the process and to compare it with relative advancement of the regions in terms of their economic and social development as described by the development index created by the authors and based on the regional policy of Zlínský Region. The results brought forward in this paper are somewhat ambiguous in terms of usefulness of European funding at the most disadvantaged regions, especially Trenčiansky. On the other hand, Zlínský Region, being more successful in supporting the disadvantaged areas, is still slightly less efficient in supporting smaller organizational forms of entrepreneurship. The differences between these two regions are growing even further due to significantly different amount of funds available to them. JEL Classification: H25, L53, O22, R58