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The Response of Regional Well-Being to EU Cohesion Policy Interventions

The world’s largest place-based economic development policy operating within a single legal and institutional architecture is the regional and urban policy of the European Union (EU). In this paper we analyse how this policy is related to the promotion of regional well-being. In order to do this, we take advantage of the fact that the different elements of the policy have different funding streams focussed on different dimensions of social and economic development, and this allows us employ a novel empirical approach exploiting a newly-available uniquely detailed dataset. On the basis of both parametric and semi-parametric frameworks our analysis demonstrates that the different elements of EU regional development policy do influence regional well-being in a manner which is consistent with the objectives of the policy. For the most part, higher interventions generate higher well-being growth. However, the ways in which they do this appear to be very different. The relationship between policy aimed at social and well-being improvements is concave, whereas for policy aimed at enhancing economic growth the relationship is convex, while for both funding streams combined the relationship is broadly linear. This implies that for at the highest levels of funding intensity, there are potentially some efficiency gains associated with switches from one funding stream to another in order to improve the effectiveness of the policy as a whole. Given the fact that regional policy accounts for one third of the EU budget, these potential efficiency gains are likely to be significant.