Auditing each fund against its own mandate: an objective-matched, municipal-scale assessment of EU cohesion instruments in France

Zouhair Ait Benhamou ()
Additional contact information
Zouhair Ait Benhamou: NU - Normandie Université, FAI - Université Le Havre Normandie - Faculté des Affaires Internationales - ULH - Université Le Havre Normandie - NU - Normandie Université, EDEHN - Equipe d'Economie Le Havre Normandie - ULH - Université Le Havre Normandie - NU - Normandie Université

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: European Union cohesion instruments pursue different legally mandated objectives, namely just transition, territorial cohesion, social inclusion and youth employment. Yet they are evaluated against shared outcomes at regional scales that aggregate heterogenous places. We propose a standardized audit that confronts each instrument with its own mandate: the stated objective is matched to municipal-scale indicators forming a need axis, against which targeting and coverage are measured across four instruments. We consolidate 72,491 co-financed operations in France (2014–2020 and 2021–2027) from Kohesio and managing-authority lists, geolocating 62.5% of operations (67.2% of amounts) to the municipality level. For the Just Transition Fund (JTF), the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) and the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI), we build regulation anchored need axes and compute targeting gradients, coverage of the highest-need quintile, and named blind-spot lists. Every audit is repeated under four index constructions: equal weights, principal components, cluster-based weights and rank normalization. We then re-run them at four coarser scales, from inter-municipal councils to regions. Each instrument misses a different kind of location. The Just Transition Fund is intensely need-targeted but reaches only 0.7% of highest-need municipalities; the European Regional Development Fund is regressive under every index construction; the European Social Fund Plus shows no need gradient and bypasses 4,550 poor rural municipalities (1.6 million inhabitants); no instrument covers more than 9% of its own highest-need municipalities. Spatial aggregation reverses these verdicts. The ERDF's need–funding correlation rises from −0.17 across municipalities to +0.80 across regions, and coverage saturates mechanically, hiding every blind spot one aggregation step above the municipality. Aggregated audits are also sensitive to index construction: at regional scale a fund's verdict can flip sign between constructions, whereas all four constructions agree at the municipal scale. Municipal-scale auditing, feasible today with existing transparency data, is the condition of a targeting verdict that is both correct and methodologically robust.

Keywords: Cohesion policy; Just Transition Fund; European Regional Development Fund; European Social Fund Plus; place-based policy; composite indicators; MAUP.; Cohesion policy Just Transition Fund European Regional Development Fund European Social Fund Plus place-based policy composite indicators MAUP; MAUP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-08-28
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05730683v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05730683v1/document (application/pdf)

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:hal:wpaper:hal-05730683

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().