Pierre Maurice Reverberi (p), Cristina Brasili, Valentina Aiello

Julia Bachtrögler

Cohesion Policy has been widely studied in terms of its economic impact and its capacity to boost economic growth in less developed regions. Far less explored, on the other hand, are the issues related to the degrees of variation in Cohesion Policy implementation schemes and the pro and cons of different governance practices. This study takes advantage from a larger research project on the perceptions of Cohesion Policy by European citizens to investigate on inter-regional variations in the experiences of Cohesion Policy, by means of an extensive quali-quantitative analysis of Cohesion Policy implementation schemes in 9 case-study European regions. The analysis shows that the functioning of multi- level governance is strongly dependent on a variety of institutional and political factors determined at domestic level and that higher institutional quality is associated with higher territorialisation of Cohesion Policy actions.

Guido Pellegrini (p), Marusca De Castris

Pierre Maurice Reverberi

The aim of the study is to evaluate the impact of Structural and Cohesion Funds (SF) on regional economic growth in Europe, considering the presence of spatial interactions among regions. In this case the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA) in the Rubin model is not valid and some econometric methods should be used in order to detect the consistent policy impact in presence of spatial dependence. The main difference with the existing literature on this issue is twofold: First, we propose a new methodology for estimating the unbiased “net” effect of SF, based on novel “spatial propensity score matching” technique that compare treated and not treated units affected by similar spillover due to SF impact (De Castris and Pellegrini, 2015). Secondly, we want to verify if the different impact between regions also depends on the intensity of treatment, measured by the normalised amount of funds distributed in each region. The high heterogeneity of regional transfer intensity across regions, also within the same country, suggests that the intensity of allocated funds between regions is a potentially important source of variability of the impact.
Our approach is based on a spatial version of the Generalized Propensity Score method, which is one of the few matching estimators proposed in the literature to address the problem of a continuous treatment. GPS is a non-parametric method to estimate treatment effects, conditional on observable determinants of treatment intensity. The two papers that evaluate the effects of transfer intensity of SF use the GPS: Mohl and Hagen (2010) using the GPS on the NUT2 grid, and Becker et al. (2012), using again the GPS but applying it to NUTS3 regions. However, both papers neglect the presence of spatial interactions between regions. This may affect the sign and the magnitude of the estimated effects. Our paper is the first that, to our knowledge, extends the GPS framework to the case of spatial spillover.
The empirical analysis is based on regional data at the NUTS2 region level, for the programming period 2000–2006. The results confirm the positive effects of SF transfers on regional growth presented in Pellegrini et al. (2013). However, the net effect in the preliminary estimates is higher, due to the presence of small, negative spillover effect among European regions.

Julia Bachtrögler (p), Ugo Fratesi, Giovanni Perucca

Guido Pellegrini

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