Regional Convergence, Structural Funds and the Role of Agricolture in the EU. A Panel-Data Approach.

This article investigates the impact of structural funds expenditure on EU regions by estimating a conditional convergence econometric model. According to this model, regional convergence is affected by both the policy treatment and the regional economic structure proxied by the agriculture employment share, which affects regional steady state level by influencing its aggregate productivity. The convergence model is specified in a dynamic panel-data form on a dataset of 206 NUTS II EU15 regions observed over more than 10 years (from 1989 to 2000). A GMM estimation is applied to obtain consistent estimates of both the á parameter and the impact of the regional policies and agriculture employment share.