This paper evaluates the impact of the European Structural Funds on the performance of employment policy in Greece. The employment policy in Greece, is a policy funded by EU and characterized by ...centralization, increased red tape, administrative overlaps and fragmentation pitfalls, factors' contributing to policy's ineffectiveness. Based on the comparative analysis of the implementation and performance of ESIF Operational Programs in Greece and by focusing on the case of the Greek Public Employment Service (OAED), this article evaluates European Union Policies actual impact on employment policy effectiveness and new jobs creation in Greece during the 2012-2020 period.
Regional aid policies after Brexit Bell, David N. F.
Oxford review of economic policy,
03/2017, Letnik:
33, Številka:
suppl_1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper examines possible outcomes for regional policy in the UK following its withdrawal from the European Union (EU). It argues that the existing Structural Funds are relatively small, but ...remain important for some locations. The evidence of their past effectiveness in reducing spatial inequalities or contributing to increased national growth is mixed. Any replacement for the Structural Funds should be aligned with current spatial interventions such as the ‘City Deals’ and ‘Northern Powerhouse’. The evidence for the existence of agglomeration economies suggests that a growth maximizing policy should focus on the development of cities. On the other hand, political economy considerations suggest that reducing regional disparities may trump efficiency, particularly where many of the regions gaining most from European support were also strong supporters of leaving the EU.
Abstract
European Cohesion Policy is a complex scheme that allocates financial resources to European regions. The implementation of the policy is based on an articulated multi-level governance that ...involves local and national authorities and the European Commission. Local authorities often face difficulties in using structural funds due to limits in their administrative capacity (supply) and/or inefficiencies in adequately stimulating applications’ submission (demand). By modelling and simulating the implementation of the policy, we explore how operations and decisions at the local authorities’ and potential applicants’ level (micro-foundations) explain emerging patterns of funds’ absorption at a regional level (macro-behaviours). Building upon a mixed-methods approach combining field research and computer simulation, we develop a model capturing the key cause–effect relationships among agents and resources within the Cohesion Policy supply-and-demand system. The outcomes elucidate how poor local administrative capabilities, including staff skills, may entail delays and low absorption performances, while showcasing the factors affecting potential applicants’ decision to submit.
•The monitoring of European Cohesion Policy implementation is based on financial proxies, i.e. absorption rate.•Policy implementation is a long process rendering absorption rate inadequate to ...efficiently monitor regional performance.•This claim is tested using a system dynamics model.•The model allows to develop three additional operational indicators (funds’ demand, funds’ offer, procedural efficiency).•These indicators can provide meaningful insights complementing absorption rate’s mono-dimensionality.
European Union’s Cohesion Policy aims to foster development and reduce disparities among regions by redistributing more than one-third of the European budget. Given the policy’s importance and complexity, an elaborated monitoring and evaluation system has been established. While attention has been dedicated to evaluating policy impact, the monitoring of inputs (i.e., allocated financial resources) has been limited to the control of financial dimensions (i.e., funds’ absorption rate). As the implementation process entails a sequence of steps, this research explores whether financial proxies alone are adequate to monitor the policy inputs. To test this hypothesis, a system dynamics model is built. Simulations highlight that the absorption rate captures shocks that might occur during the inputs’ expenditure with significant delay. To that end, we elaborate three novel operative monitoring indicators (i.e., funds’ demand, funds’ offer, procedural efficiency), which may overcome the financial indicators’ mono-dimensionality and time lags’ limitations.
The article addresses the use of the European grants, approved after Romania joined the European Union, conducting a technical analysis of the first programming period 2007-2013 and of the next ...period 2014-2020, with direct applicability on the degree of their absorption in Romania. In the first part of the paper is done analysis of legal regulations at European level and at national level, for the two funding period, highlighting the role of institutions involved in the implementation of Structural Funds in terms of the influence they have in establishing coherent policy achievement indicators set by the Lisbon Strategy for the 2007-2013 programming period and, subsequently, by the Europe 2020 Strategy for 2014-2020. Also, an important aspect of the paper is the analysis of the importance of proper implementation of the Partnership Agreement for 2014-2020, applicable at the system level by the management authorities, as well as beneficiaries of externally projects using European grants.
Members of Parliament are often thought to attract funding into their constituencies to increase their local support, and eventually, secure re-election. Nevertheless, there is only limited research ...focusing on the question whether or not government funding indeed affects the MPs’ electoral performances. I focus on pork barrel politics in a single country, namely Hungary, and use town-level European Union Structural Funds data between 2007 and 2010 to explain the electoral performance of single-member district MPs at the 2010 general elections. I find that increasing funding improves government MPs’ electoral performances and that the size of the effect is conditional upon the mayors’ party affiliations. In towns with government mayors, government MPs perform significantly better than in towns with opposition mayors. The results have consequences in the fields of the distribution of Structural Funds, the electoral connection between legislators and voters and the European Union’s contribution to regime legitimation.
We quantify general equilibrium effects of place-based policies in a multi-region framework with population mobility, trade and agglomeration economies. Using detailed data on EU transfers, we ...estimate the local effects of different transfer types on productivity, income and transportation costs. Integrating these estimates into the model, we derive the spatial distribution of economic activity and corresponding welfare that would have materialized without transfers. We show that EU transfers have improved welfare. Substantial further welfare gains could be reached by reallocating funds across regions without increasing the budget. We identify the welfare-optimal spatial distribution for each transfer type and show that wage subsidies should rather be directed to few poor and peripheral regions while investments in transport infrastructure are most efficient in highly productive and/or central regions.
Current EU policies aim to support regional research, development, and innovation activities. The Cohesion Policy, implemented through Structural Funds (SFs) Operational Programmes, seeks to foster ...local level innovation. In parallel, universities have become important drivers of regional development through their ‘third mission’ driven by the different policy levels. This article investigates the tensions between the primary institutional logics of the university and the institutional logic of the SF programmes in peripheral regions as experienced by a multi-disciplinary university network from Finland. The findings from the case study reveal competing and co-evolving institutional logics of the two frameworks; university-led SF activities increase collaboration with local stakeholders, but the implementation of SF projects remains challenging (e.g. strict guidelines, higher education (HE) policies driving research excellence). Further investigation of these results in different regional contexts could provide new tools for managing the university third mission more efficiently, through SF programmes and beyond.
Increasing regional differentiation and discontent in Europe have directed critical attention to European territorial cohesion policy and the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESI Fund) ...mechanism. There is wide literature investigating macro-level processes of regional differentiation and cohesion as well as the efficiency of multi-level governance in the implementation of the funding mechanism. This study contributes to the existing multidisciplinary literature on cohesion policy and structural funds by extending an understanding of the ESI Funds system to a local agency perspective with a specific focus on Finnish municipalities and the programme period 2014-2020, characterized by austerity policies, regional discontent and disagreement between the ESI programme regions. The examination offers a new understanding of local agents and beneficiaries' differential access in the ESI Funds, showing that the agency of municipalities in the ESI Funds is simultaneously enabled and constrained by the multilevel Structural Funds programme's areas of specialization, national regional policies, partnerships and the local environment. The findings indicate that generating inclusive and equal possibilities for all municipalities would necessitate more attention to the allocation of ESI Funds within the programme regions, not just between them.
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