The Unbearable Instability of Structural Funds' Distribution

In order to promote “cohesion, competitiveness and cooperation” across Europe, the EU has established a common regional policy to support underdeveloped territories. This EU regional policy required to set up a very complex mechanism to implement such a huge effort to coordinate many interventions across highly differentiated territories. However, those territories are provided with very different institutional settings, and then the mechanism to coordinate all of them becomes particularly complex. The aim of this paper is to discuss the EU multi-level governance for structural funds (SFs), revising the origin, rationale and evolution of this policy in order to identify the limits of the institutional mechanism for the implementation of this policy. These limits will show their effects on the unstable distribution of SFs across the EU regions on a long-term perspective. Results show that the intervention of the EU is neither constant nor stable across regions, independently from their development paths. This instability should provide further arguments on the discussion about the SF policy and governance in order to take into considerations also institutional limits of the EU.     

Unwritten Factors Affecting Structural Funds: The Influence of Regional Political Behaviours on the Implementation of EU Cohesion Policy

While EU regional policy has the ambitious objective of supporting lagging regions and promoting inter-regional convergence, its impact is dependent on the ability of regional policymakers to secure and use EU funding to meet the region's needs. This paper aims to show under which conditions politics has a defining influence on the distribution, allocation and utilization of structural funds (SF), specifically in Objective 1 regions. The empirical analysis focuses on the 2000–2006 programming cycle in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. The results show that regions politically aligned with national governing coalitions tend to perform better in terms of received SF support and enjoy more flexibility in implementing SF. However, the influence of regional political behaviours on economic performances is very limited. The findings confirm the importance of politics in influencing SF implementation, but its limited influence on economic outcomes.