The Contribution of European Cohesion Policy to Public Investment

Cohesion Policy (known also as Regional Policy) is the European Union’s main development policy (Viesti and Prota 2008; Viesti 2019). It has evolved over time: from a tool to counterbalance the regional disparities inevitably emerging from the Single Market, and, subsequently, from the Monetary Union, to the investment pillar of the new economic policy coordination (Berkowitz et al. 2015). In the period 2007–2013, as result of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, Cohesion Policy has been the major source of finance for public investment for many Member States of the European Union, representing up to 57% of government capital investment. The aim of this chapter is twofold: first, to provide an overview of the expenditures of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Cohesion Fund (CF) at national and regional levels over the last decades, and second, to discuss the impact of the investments co-financed through these two funds mainly in terms of physical achievements. We focus on the ERDF and the CF (which represent about 75% of Cohesion Policy funding in the 2014–2020 programming period), since the bulk of their expenditure provides support to public investment. Our analysis covers three programming periods: 1994–1999, 2000–2006, 2007–2013, though we focus mainly on 2000–2006 and 2007–2013 in order to take into account the Eastern enlargement of the European Union and the effects of 2008 crisis. We use two datasets made available by the European Commission. The first one provides, in a single source, historic long-term regionalised annual EU expenditure data covering four programming periods, but it does not contain thematic information. The second one shows allocations and expenditures from 2000 to 2013 broken down by expenditure categories. Moreover, the study on “Geography of Expenditures”, one of the Work Packages of the ex post evaluation of Cohesion Policy programmes 2007–2013, has produced a consolidated database covering the regional ERDF and CF investments from 2000 to year 2014 at NUTS2 level (WIIW and ISMERI Europa 2015).