The economic impact of structural and Cohesion Funds across sectors: Immediate, medium-to-long term effects and spillovers

Francesco Scotti, Andrea Flori and Fabio Pammolli ()

Economic Modelling, 2022, vol. 111, issue C

Abstract: The EU Cohesion Policy has progressively diversified the financed sectors, with possible heterogeneous impacts on local growth. However, the literature is still largely oriented to the analysis of aggregate impacts. Our study offers a granular investigation of the sectoral impacts of Structural and Cohesion Funds on European NUTS 2 over the period 2007–2014. We find that expenditures in energy, R&D, and transportation sectors stimulate higher GDP per capita growth with persistent effects, coherently with reduction of production costs, higher accessibility and innovation in recipient regions. These effects are enhanced when expenditures are more diversified across sectors. Spatial panel models show that transport sector generates the highest spillovers, leveraging on agglomeration and proximity, while at geographical level we find substantial spillovers cross-cutting national boundaries. From a policy perspective, our analysis suggests how spatial and sectoral effects can contribute to the design of a more effective allocation of the EU budget.

Keywords: Structural and cohesion funds; GDP per capita growth; Spillovers; Economic impact; NUTS 2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999322000797
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:111:y:2022:i:c:s0264999322000797

DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2022.105833

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly

More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().