Debora Gambina (p), Fabio Mazzola

Sébastien Bourdin

The work investigates the effect of additionality of both national and European Cohesion Policy in Italian NUTS-2 territories with respect to national “Ordinary” government spending during the 2007-13 and 2014-20 programming periods. Despite the emphasis on the Additionality Principle made by the European Union, the Cohesion Funds may generate a distortion in the domestic allocative process. We deal with an ex-post regional and sectoral panel evaluation of Cohesion Funds’ additionality to the Ordinary Policy, treating specifically endogeneity. In particular, we focus on this issue by looking at the interdependencies of the two policies in four different sectors of government spending, namely Education, Training, Road Transportation and Non-Road Transportation. The policy variables are computed by combining data from Opencoesione, a database on cohesion projects available for Italy, and the Public Territorial Accounts (Conti Pubblici Territoriali) database referring to regionalized public spending. From the estimation results, Cohesion Policy appears to be a complement for growth to other source of spending in non-road transportation network, while a crowding out effect seems to occur in the education and training sectors. A positive but not significant effect is found for road transportation network. This analysis stressed the not negligible effect of the Cohesion Policy treatment on ordinary disbursements to the Italian regions and the sectoral heterogeneity in Structural Funds’ additionality.

Tryfonas Christou (p), Abián García-Rodríguez, Tillmann Heidelk, Nicholas Lazarou, Philippe Monfort, and Simone Salotti

Debora Gambina

The 2021-2027 cohesion policy programme is explicitly required to deliver on the European Union's green transition priority and its interventions should preserve, protect, and improve the environment. For the first time in the history of cohesion policy, the legislation specifies the share of spending that supports climate change objectives or environmental objectives, or both. We present here an analysis of the expected macroeconomic impact of the measures addressing these objectives. We show that environmental investments would lead to significant improvements in GDP and employment in all regions of the European Union, with positive effects on interregional economic convergence. The impact is particularly significant in the less developed regions of the European Union and underscores the potential for the cohesion policy interventions in support of the green transition and economic growth to go hand-in-hand, while also fostering cohesion, a central value proposition of the European Union.

Dana Drueke (p), Alexander Kaiser, Axel Schaffer

Tryfonas Christou

Mobility is a basic need of society and crucial to ensure economic prosperity. As the urban population increases, there is a growing demand for transportation, leading to negative impacts on the environment and the individual's health. Simultaneously, with growing awareness of environmental issues, more people, especially in urban areas, are aspiring towards a sustainable lifestyle. In order to harmonize the population’s urge to live more sustainably and at least maintain the present degree of mobility, policymakers working on urban development consider criteria linked to economic viability, environmental protection and social equity. Interestingly, while the issues described above concern all types of urban environments, sustainability indices are often only available for large metropolitan areas. In this paper, we modify and apply a Sustainable Mobility Index to a sample of about 55 German municipalities of different sizes confronted with differing challenges for integrated urban development. Further, we calculate the technical efficiency of the municipalities' transport systems based on a nonparametric approach relating territorial accessibility to economic performance, energy and area consumption input. In a second step, a multiple regression analysis is conducted to explore the link between the sustainability of urban areas and their technical efficiency and the influence of transport related factors. Interestingly, first findings suggest that the technical efficiency of a municipality's transport system has a negative significant impact on sustainable mobility. The sustainability of municipalities does not necessarily coincide with an environmentally sound transport system. Further, we can confirm positive effects of population density and car sharing user frequency, whereas private car ownership and municipalities' areas have a negative effect on sustainable mobility. We conclude that efficiency might not be a suitable strategy for achieving sustainable mobility outside of highly populated metropolitan areas.

Sébastien Bourdin (p), Sergio Destefanis, Gianluigi Coppola

Dana Drueke

The economic literature has shown how employment growth generally comes at the expense of productivity growth (Enflo, 2010; Choudhry and Ark, 2010). Yet this issue raises important policy conundrums. For example, policies that aim to promote labour-intensive industries in developing regions in order to foster rapid employment growth may paradoxically retard productivity growth and run counter to the objective of rapid and sustainable economic growth. This issue is important in the context of Cohesion Policy as it works to deliver higher growth and employment in the EU’s regions (Crescenzi et al., 2020).
In this paper we address the existence of policy trade-offs affecting the impact of European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIFs) in the EU NUTS2 regions through a novel empirical approach based on the combination of a multi-input multi-output distance function and a geographically weighted regression (GWR) approach. Using series from the “Historic EU payments” provided by the EU Commission, which supply relatively long and consistent time series for ESIFs throughout the EU, as well as other series from the Eurostat Regio database, we explore the possibility that the EU Cohesion Policy has a different impact on the components of GDP per capita, namely GDP per employee (labour productivity) and employment rate. We also shed light on the factors affecting this trade-off between productivity and employment, distinguishing between national and regional elements.
The separation of the impact on labour productivity from that on employment rate is achieved through a multi-input multi-output transformation function (Coelli et al., 1999; Kumbhakar et al., 2012; Kumbhakar, 2013) that allows for their joint determination and the possible existence of interaction effects among their determinants. Trough the GWR approach we can detect spatial non-stationarity in the parameters of the transformation function and highlight the role of spatial dependence and heterogeneity in this function (Bourdin, 2019). Additionally, we deal with the selection bias typical of counterfactual policy evaluation through a control function approach (Coppola et al., 2018).
Preliminary results indicate that ESIFs are very significant for the determination of GDP per capita. When GDP per capita is decomposed in GDP per employee and employment rate, we find, particularly for the employment rate, (i) effects of the ERDF, the ESF and the EAFRD that follow different spatial patterns, (ii) significant interactions effects between the ERDF and the ESF. These results provide insights on important policy issues that are difficult to be unveiled with more usual estimation techniques.