Antonella Rita Ferrara (p), Lewis Dijkstra, Philip McCann, Rosanna Nisticò

Dagmara Kociuba

see extended abstract

Sebastien Bourdin (p)

Antonella Ferrara

Since the EU’s cohesion policy creation, this policy has aimed at reducing regional disparities, restructuring regional economies, creating jobs and stimulating private investment. In their article, BECKER ET AL. (2012) wondered whether this policy really helped to favour growth in the regions concerned. They concluded that reorienting the European aid that was more concentrated in targeted regions would improve the effectiveness of the spent funds. They were therefore able to demonstrate the spatial heterogeneity of the effectiveness of the cohesion policy in Europe.
Despite the fact that the EU has been extended to eleven new Central and Eastern European countries, the question of the future of European policies, particularly the cohesion policy, remains problematic.
As the aim of our article is more to identify the spatial nonstationarity of the effectiveness of the funds than to establish general rules and regularities about the studied phenomenon, we prefer using a local model rather than a global spatial model, like these scholars. Furthermore, this is what DALL’ERBA AND FANG (2015) recommend in order to reconsider the “one size fits all” theory, and therefore demonstrate that the European funds can have a significant positive impact in some regions and no or even opposite effects in others.
We use the GWR - geographically weighted regression - to assume that there is a significant spatial variation in the influence of the factors instrumental in regional growth. One of our main objectives is to show the spatial heterogeneity of the effectiveness of European funds in the explanation of the growth of Central and Eastern European regions. Our article contributes to the understanding of the evaluation of the effectiveness of European structural funds over the last two programming periods. The analysis is based on a sample of 147 Central and Eastern European regions at NUTS 3 level over the period 2000-2014 using GWR. Although the favoured level of allocation of European funds is NUTS 2, we have made the decision to work on NUTS 3 regions in order to provide more detailed understanding of the effects generated by the EU Cohesion Policy transfer on growth (like BECKER ET AL., 2012 or GAGLIARDI AND PERCOCO, 2017). The choice of (i) focusing on Central and Eastern European regions, (ii) this level of analysis, NUTS 3 and (iii) this method is unprecedented in the literature.

Dagmara Kociuba (p), Ewelina Kuchno

Sebastien Bourdin

The objective of the article is the presentation of the practical aspect of implementation of one of the new tools of Cohesion Policy, namely Integrated Territorial Investments (ITI) in Poland. The article is composed of two parts. The first part discusses the rationale and rules of implementation of ITI in EU Cohesion Policy 2014-2020. The second part presents the process of implementation of ITI in functional urban areas (FUA) in Poland. In the context of general rules of implementation of the instrument resulting from statutory provisions and ministry guidelines, the article presents the practical aspects of the process of establishment of an ITI Union, including the delimitation of the support area, development of the ITI Strategy, and thematic and substantive scope of projects designated for financing. Moreover, the paper presents the degree of advancement of the implementation of ITI as at the end of May 2018. The analyses permitted the identification of areas that will receive the most support (where?) and development of a catalogue of predominant investments (what?) and their beneficiaries (for whom?). Moreover, factors determining heterogenic effects of implementation of ITI in Poland were determined (what works?). Finally, the article includes recommendations of what should be changed in the institutional, governance, and strategic programming aspect for the implementation of ITI in the future perspective to be more effective and not lead to the dispersal of resources.