Ioannis Saratsis (p)

Since the early beginning of European Cohesion Policy in the mid 80’s under the scheme of Mediterranean Integrated Projects, many changes occurred in the relevant Regulations. The most recent changes provide a European wide Strategic framework for the development of the Union and specific country guidelines. Also in the current programming period new Territorial Instruments are available as an effort to implement the so called “Place Based” approach. Moreover, a comprehensive planning system emerged for the efficient implementation of the resources allocated to the Union’s Member States.
In Greece the first implementation efforts were characterized by the lack of comprehensive development strategies and the allocation of the funds mostly in basic infrastructure projects (like transport infrastructure). It is commonly accepted that these projects were necessary for Greek Regions and Cities, but they didn’t provide a stable growth path. In the recent (2014-2020) programming period and after more than 30 years of CP funding, most of the available resources still go to basic infrastructure (more than 35%).
Another problem is that the amount that is foreseen for Territorial Instruments like CLLD, ITI is limited to the minimum acceptable by the Regulations. These Territorial Instruments should be used in order to respond to the complex development problems of Cities and Regions.
Obviously, systematic development planning and changes in the administrative capacity of National, Regional and Local Authorities in the country that are evident in the last 20 years don’t have the expected results. To a large extend this is due to dominant role of the Central Government and the absence of innovative thinking in Local Authorities and stakeholders. These reasons are briefly analyzed in the paper and some policy directions are given for the next programming period.

Eva Psatha (p)

See extended abstract

Silvia Cerisola (p), Roberto Camagni, Roberta Capello, Ugo Fratesi

A large number of works have explored the trend of disparities in the European Union in terms of convergence and in relation with cohesion policies, also focusing in some cases on the differences between inter-national and intra-national disparities (among others, Petrakos et al. 2005, Ezcurra and Pascual 2007, Geppert and Stephan 2008 and among the most recent contributions Butkus et al. 2018, Iammarino et al. 2018 and Rosés and Wolf 2018). However, most studies are completely inductive, focus on either EU15 countries or CEECs and usually involve relatively short and recent periods. In addition, a thorough investigation of the relationship between the political and economic integration in the EU and the historical evolution of disparities is missing in the existing literature.
This paper aims at filling these gaps through providing an interpretative framework that considers institutional changes at both the political and the economic level, thus taking into account the subsequent enlargements of the EU on the one hand and the birth of the single market and the introduction of the euro on the other. Exploiting regional data on GDP per capita from 1980 to 2015, the present work presents an in depth Europe wide (28 countries) long run analysis of the link between relevant institutional changes within the European integration process and the trend in disparities. Such trend is also explored at both the inter- and the intra-national levels, to be able to detect specific and potentially diverging behaviors between and within countries.


References
Butkus M., D. Cibulskiene, A. Maciulyte-Sniukiene, and K. Matuzeviciute (2018) What Is the Evolution of Convergence in the EU? Decomposing EU Disparities up to NUTS3 Level, Sustainability, vol. 10, pp. 15-52.
Ezcurra R. and P. Pascual (2007) Regional Polarization and National Development in the European Union, Urban Studies, vol. 44(1), pp. 99-122.
Geppert K. and A. Stephan (2008) Regional disparities in the European Union: Convergence and agglomeration, Papers in Regional Science, vol. 87(2), pp. 193-218.
Iammarino S., A. Rodríguez-Pose, and M. Storper (2018) Regional inequality in Europe: evidence, theory and policy implications, Journal of Economic Geography, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lby021.
Petrakos G., A. Rodríguez-Pose and A. Rovolis (2005) Growth, integration, and regional disparities in the European Union, Environment and Planning A, vol. 37, pp. 1837-1855.
Rosés J. R. and N. Wolf (2018) The Economic Development of Europe’s Regions: A Quantitative History Since 1900, Routledge Explorations in Economic History, Routledge.