Mr Francesco Molica (p), Dr Anabela Santos

The proposal on Cohesion Policy post-2027 features an enhanced focus on strategic objectives (i.e. achieving leadership in emerging technologies such as AI and clean tech, strengthening defence capabilities, etc.) and a shift towards more top-down governance. This approach draws on the recent experience of the NextGenerationEU instrument and aligns with the strategic competitiveness agenda highlighted in the Draghi Report.

However, can this renewed strategic orientation be reconciled with the traditional objective of Cohesion Policy to foster regional convergence?

This paper investigates this question through the lens of green innovation investment policies. There is limited research systematically exploring these policies from a territorial perspective. The paper addresses this gap by analysing the effects of EU green R&D investments under Cohesion Policy and Horizon 2020, used as proxies for place-based and place-neutral green innovation policies, on regional environmental (green) patenting levels. The empirical analysis relies on a double/debiased machine learning framework based on post-double-selection LASSO.

The results show that green innovation policies have significant but highly heterogeneous effects. Positive impacts are largely concentrated in more developed and innovative regions. By contrast, no statistically significant causal effects on green patenting are found in less developed and less innovative regions, which already display substantially weaker green innovation capacities.

This evidence highlights the risk that a stronger emphasis of Cohesion Policy on new strategic priorities such as promoting green technologies may achieve very little in relation to the objective of regional convergence if adequate enabling conditions are not in place. Moreover, place-based (Cohesion Policy) and place-neutral (Horizon 2020) subsidies appear to exhibit substitution effects, which may further reduce policy additionality and undermine the coherence of the EU innovation policy mix.

Overall, the paper underscores the importance of strengthening regional innovation ecosystems and framework conditions to ensure that green innovation policies contribute not only to competitiveness but also to convergence.

Dr. Cristina García-Nicolás (p), Dr. Encarnación Murillo-García

Next Generation EU (NGEU) represents a major innovation in the European Union’s economic governance, both because of its exceptional and temporary nature and because of its institutional design. Through the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), NGEU introduces a performance-oriented intervention logic based on milestones and targets, with disbursements conditional on results and a strong thematic concentration of investments. While this approach enabled a rapid response to the economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis, it also raises important questions from a territorial and governance perspective.
This paper analyses the interaction between NGEU and EU cohesion policy, traditionally grounded in a long-term, place-based framework centred on ex ante allocation, additionality, partnership and multilevel governance. The coexistence of both instruments during the 2021–2027 programming period creates a policy environment in which different intervention logics operate simultaneously. From this perspective, NGEU can be interpreted as a stress test for cohesion policy, as it challenges its core principles and highlights potential tensions between performance orientation and territorial sensitivity.

Using Spain as a case study, the paper examines how NGEU interacts with a highly decentralised governance structure. Drawing on data on the territorial allocation and implementation of RRF and REACT-EU funds, combined with regional socio-economic indicators at the NUTS-2 level, the analysis identifies patterns in fund absorption and implementation speed.
Preliminary findings suggest that territorial outcomes are closely linked to regional administrative capacity. In the absence of explicit territorial allocation criteria, implementation dynamics may risk reinforcing existing disparities. These results underline the need to strengthen coherence between performance-based instruments and territorial approaches, reinforce regional capacity, and preserve multilevel governance in the post-2027 reform of cohesion policy.

Dr. Debora Gambina (p), Prof. Fabio Mazzola (p), Dr. Pietro Pizzuto

This work evaluates the additionality principle of European structural funds at EU NUTS-2 level across different programming periods, up to the most recent cycles. Existing evidence provides mixed conclusions on whether EU transfers complement or substitute domestic public spending. The debate on the additionality of cohesion funds has re-emerged in light of recent economic crises, which may have led national and regional governments to use cohesion funds to replace domestic fiscal expenditure under budgetary constraints and austerity policies, and in view of the simultaneous implementation of NGEU during the 2021-27 cohesion policy programming. We investigate the dynamic impact of cohesion policy expenditures on domestic public spending and the sources of heterogenous effects (based for example on different business cycle position and typology of funds). The empirical strategy employs the local projection approach (Jorda, 2005) which allows to estimate impulse-response functions and flexible modelling of heterogeneous and nonlinear dynamics across regional characteristics. Instrumental variables methods are applied to identify plausibly exogenous variation in cohesion policy expenditures. Our work provides relevant insights regarding the introduction of the additionality principle in the forthcoming 2028-34 cohesion policy cycle and has implications also for Next Generation EU, whose spending may have displaced public investments.