Alternative scenarios of after-crisis conditions for regional growth in the context of the Cohesion Policy: An example of the Polish region of Warmiñsko-Mazurskie

The comprehensive and complex category of territorial capital is regarded as a crucial driving force behind regional development. It does, however, depend upon increasingly growing tangible and intangible interlinks and interdependencies of a particular region with a closer and further surrounding. Discovering and exploiting regional endogenous potentials cannot only be coupled with smart specializing. It ought to go along with flexibility of regional structures in order to more efficiently cushion and more creatively deal with changes going on outside of a region. The main aim of the paper is to present a methodology to evaluate the regional efficiency of the EU Cohesion Policy in the various development scenarios which might be crucial for the decision-makers both on the national and regional level in the upcoming 2014-2020 EU financial framework. The methodology is a fusion of the foresight method with the HERMIN macromodelling framework. This methodological combination will be highlighted using an example of the Polish NUTS-2 region of Warminsko-Mazurskie. Firstly, in the research process major tendencies in the global, European and national environment of the region will be sketched. Emphasis is to be put upon an analysis of closer and broader context conditions for the regional growth including possible macroeconomic, social, demographic, political, environmental, institutional, technological and policy-based ones. It will enable us to set up the most extreme conditions for regional development. The space between the two extremes will be filled up with a number of more likely scenarios providing us with the comprehensive context to carefully and thoroughly analyze regional specifics and regional growth scenarios. Secondly, a counter-factual analysis of the Cohesion Policy impact on the growth of Warminsko-Mazurskie will be carried out. The research tool to be used will be macroeconomic HERMIN model for the economy of Warmiñsko-Mazurskie. HERMIN modelling framework is an established methodology which is applied both to forecast/foresight analyses and counter-factual ones. Along with other 15 regional models and HERMIN model for Poland it belongs to the system of HERMIN models for Poland. The outcome will enable us to analyze and compare impacts of Cohesion Policy on regional socio-economic development in different scenarios that are more or less likely to occur.