During the last few decades, the European Union has been promoting the use of PPPs in order to accelerate the development of the TEN-T for ensuring economic, social and territorial cohesion and ...increasing accessibility within the EU. To that end, several mechanisms have been put at the disposal of the Member States to enhance transport infrastructure of interest for the EU. This paper conducts a review of the main funding programs implemented by the EU authorities in order to evaluate to what extent the European support has been rightly channelled to PPP projects. To that end, a multiple regression model has been applied to road PPP projects in Spain to analyse whether those PPP projects with EU financial backing ultimately have a higher economic performance compared to those projects not receiving such a support. The research concludes that there is a positive correlation between receiving European financial support and the good economic performance of those projects.
•The EU has made available several financing mechanisms to promote the use of Public Private Partnerships (PPP).•EU support to Spanish transport PPPs and its influence on their economic performance are analysed.•Having EU financial backing has a positive influence on the economic performance of road projects.•Both shadow toll and availability payment mechanisms have higher economic returns than toll ones.
The necessity of a regional development policy at the nowadays’ European Union level has become vital since the beginning of the enlargement process in 1973 when to those six founding states ...(Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Netherlands) subjoined Great Britain, Ireland and Denmark. In 1957 when European Economic Community was founded, the EU-6 recorded a similar development level, the regional problems being isolated only in Southern part of Italy. Although on Italy request, the Treaty ascertained the existence of some inequities between prosperity levels of different regions, article 130 was one of the fundamental motives of creating the European Investment Bank, which may be considered one of the regional policy instruments. The enlargement process increased regional problems, major disparities regarding the economic development level being recorded between EU-6 regions and regions of the new member states (North part of England and North part of Ireland). Rural areas from Denmark and Ireland recorded a precarious development compared with similar areas from member states, and mining regions of Great Britain were confronted with industrial re-conversion problems. These kinds of problems existed even inside member states so that carboniferous regions Lorena (France), Ruhr (Germany), South part of Belgium were strongly affected by the deindustrialisation process. These situations led to the creation of the European Regional Development Fund in 1975 and its main objective at that moment was promoting innovation and infrastructure development in order to adjust the existing discrepancies at the Community level.
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