The Eu Cohesion Policy and the Factors Conditioning Success and Failure: Evidence from 15 Regions

Regional needs, regional targeting and regional growth: an assessment of EU Cohesion Policy in UK regions

“…Concerning the question of the economic returns of bottom-up policy designs, Crescenzi and Giua (2016) have shown that the most effective strategies are those mixing top-down with bottom-up approaches. An alternative line of investigation has been opened recently by the work of Crescenzi et al (2017). Using a selected sample of 15 regions from across the EU, the authors find that congruence between regional socio-economic needs and spending priorities is a significant factor influencing the effectiveness of Cohesion Policy.…”

“…The third dimension relates to how funds have been targeted towards investment axes with respect to regional advantages and needs. Following Crescenzi et al (2017), our main hypothesis is that targeting of expenditures towards areas of regional need (alignment between effort and need) can be growth-enhancing. As explained in section 2, a competing hypothesis is that growth is enhanced by allocation of funds into areas of advantage (prioritising on a region's strengths).…”

“…In this paper we sought to address these questions using previously unused data for the UK covering three programming periods with detail on funding allocations across different investment categories. Inspired by somerather selectiveevidence on the issue of targeting offered recently by Crescenzi et al (2017), we developed a novel methodology which allowed us to measure the alignment between regional needs and the prioritising of commitments across investment pillars; and to examine, on the basis of this, how the level, concentration and targeting of investments impacts on regional growth.…”

Did the Governance of EU Funds Help Italian Regional Labour Markets during the Great Recession?

“…The success of the cohesion policy for promoting regional development is conditional to specific economic and social factors (Arbolino and Boffardi, 2017;Crescenzi et al, 2017). The quality of regional governments and institutions has been recognized as a key variable for explaining the effectiveness of a cohesion policy on a national (Ederveen et al, 2006) and a regional level (Becker et al, 2013).…”

“…This model allowed us to limit the occurrence of Hurwicz-type dynamic panel bias in our small T and large N panel: some covariates may be correlated with present and past errors (Nickell, 1981). We opted for the GMM-system model given the degree of persistence in our data (Crescenzi et al, 2017). Results obtained with the GMM difference are not substantially different.…”