Have structural funds affected EU regional convergence?

Abstract

EU cohesion and decline of EU regions disparities are at first concern of EU institutions. Besides extensive planning of Cohesion Policy and financial support through Structural Funds, wide literature explores the effectiveness and wonder whether there are options of improvement of EU strategy. In our survey we employ a pairwise approach to detect regional convergence, firstly unconditionally and also including Structural Funds. Avoiding implications and restrictions of neoclassical framework, stochastic approach offers us the advantage of examining all possible pairs of regions, given our sample of 284 regions and 21 years period (2000-2020), by testing for unit root. Rejection of null hypothesis represents stationarity, yet convergence and we summarize with a low proportion of pairs to convergence in all the cases applied. In both cases the result of convergence is moderate; in some cases of regions such as greek ones, little or no affection of EU supports appears to happen. Reasoning of the result demands further investigation which exceed to purpose of this survey. However, we submit our suggestions to further exploration at this field supporting other authors’ opinion about sensitivity to specific features of economies in order to planned strategies’ effectiveness.