Does EU Cohesion Policy affect territorial inequalities and regional development?

Abstract

International audience ; We extend the literature on Cohesion Policy effectiveness by considering how the cohesion policy affects both within regional disparities and economic growth. For that purpose, a panel database of 205 NUTS2 regions of the UE-25 for 2000-2014 is used. We estimate panel data regressions with fixed effects and a spatial autoregressive term in order to control for unobservable characteristics and spatial dependence. Our results emphasize a trade-off between within and between regional disparities for EU-25 regions over the 2000-2014 period.