Federico Fantechi (p), Ugo Fratesi

Marusca De Castris

The impacts of cohesion policy have been demonstrated to be different in different regions, depending on various territorial determinants, and this is also worth for firm support measures. Recent reports and academic publications highlight however the importance of moving beyond administrative borders to analyze the implementation of policies and their impact.

The aim of this paper is to see whether the endowment of territorial capital assets in the physical proximity of firms affects the impact of cohesion policy support, starting with the most traditional and measurable of assets: different typologies of infrastructure.

In order to provide spatial patterns not tied to any administrative borders, cohesion policy projects for the programming periods 2007-2013 and 2014-2020 implemented in Italy are point georeferenced to the location of the specific beneficiaries. The same takes place for territorial capital assets, so that an econometric analysis is able to relate the two elements.

Employing such data, the paper is able to identify the spatial patterns connecting these indicators to the implementation of cohesion policies beyond administrative boundaries and, in this way, provide evidence on which territorial capital assets are relevant to regional policy and at which level of proximity.

Jarosław Nazarczuk (p)

Federico Fantechi

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have been widely implemented in many countries to stimulate economic growth, improve the labour market, and attract investments. Although the instrument is a worldwide initiative, it operates in many forms, including the scope of privileges, and different legal and economic environments, which makes international comparisons difficult. The microeconomic evidence on public aid support in SEZs is scarce. Most empirical firm-level contributions undertake the effects of SEZs on firms’ employment, with insufficient evidence in other fields of firms’ operation (i.e. exports, productivity, financial standings).
In Poland, the SEZs programme was introduced in 1995 and will end in 2026. Its successor, Polish Investment Zone (PIZ), established in 2018, differs substantially from its prototype. It also embraces tax exemptions (CIT/PIT) in the form of state aid but throughout the whole country. The most significant differences embrace the process of granting a permit. In the PIZ programme, it is contingent on meeting both quantitative and qualitative criteria, not only the quantitative ones as it was in the previous programme. Therefore, firms willing to obtain state support must not only invest a certain amount of money (quantitative criteria) but also meet qualitative criteria related to the nature of the investment and the quality of jobs created.
The motivation for the research stems from the lack of empirical evidence on the operation and effectiveness of the PIZ program in Poland from its start. Most of the empirical evidence concentrates on a regional or national level of analysis and depicts the effects of the former (SEZ) programme. The existing firm-level research is relatively scarce and usually available for a small number of firms. The changes introduced in 2018 provide an opportunity to investigate the impact of public aid on firms. Therefore, the paper aims to explore the microeconomic effects of public aid in Polish PIZs following the changes introduced in 2018 on a territorially restricted sample to one (out of 14) PIZ managing organisation (case study). Since the treatment is time-varying - depending on the year in which the firm has been given the decision of support and started its operation – the difference in differences (DID) method is used to estimate the effect of the public aid in one of PIZs on firms. Preliminary findings suggest that the PIZ programme might have positive effects on firms.

Lionel Vedrin (p)

Jarosław Nazarczuk

Since the 2000s, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has become one of the key components of rural development policy, which takes the form of a national programme in France ; however, few studies have been dedicated to assessing its impact on the attractiveness of rural areas. This article presents the results of an evaluation of the specific impacts, during the period from 2007 to 2013, of the European rural development measures and measures relating to quality of life and diversification of the rural economy applied in France on the economic and residential attractiveness of the municipalities benefiting from the measures. The impacts of the projects are estimated using a difference-in-differences method with propensity score matching. The evaluation reveals little impact on residential attractiveness. However, it also allows for the identification of positive impacts on face‑to‑face jobs linked to local services, with around 80,000 jobs having been created during this period at a cost of EUR 18,000 per job, which is lower than has been seen with comparable policies.

Marusca De Castris (p), Daniele Di Gennaro, Guido Pellegrini

Lionel Vedrine

Recent literature suggests that cohesion policies can be effective in promoting regional convergence and reducing spatial disparities, particularly when they are well-designed and targeted to address the specific needs and challenges of different regions. The effectiveness of cohesion policies can also be enhanced by taking into account the role of spatial spillovers, and designing policies that promote positive spillovers and mitigate negative ones.

Evaluating the total effects of these policies is therefore complex, as both direct effects and spillovers must be considered. Evaluation of spillovers’ effects is generally excluded from the classic counterfactual model, which does not allow for interference effects between treated and untreated units of the policy (named SUTVA assumption). This work aims to overcome this restriction, by implementing a methodology fully coherent with the counterfactual approach relaxing this assumption. We propose a novel spatial multilevel DID model, based on the SARMA specification, that allows for spillover effects. The paper evaluates the total effects of regional policy of the programming period 2007-2013 using data at both NUTS-2 and NUTS-3 level. Results show positive effects of European regional policy in the Eastern regions, where the policy produces positive externalities, reducing inequalities with the more developed regions.