About one third of total EU budgetary resources are spent on implementing cohesion policy. Therefore, it is understandable that the European Commission and especially donor states (acting for the taxpayers) need to be reassured that their contributions are spent wisely and are being used...

Unlike the single European market and the single currency, EU cohesion policy – although the subject of major reforms at the end of the 1980s - has never been ex-posed to as rigorous investigation and research about its objectives and impact evaluation as the other two policy initiatives. As a...

An ex-ante impact analysis of EC Cohesion Policy investment programmes for the period 2007-2013 was recently carried out on behalf of the European Commission (DG Regional Policy) using three different economic models: the QUEST II model of DG-ECFIN, the ECOMOD model of EcoMod Network/Free...

In this paper we describe an integrated approach for assessing the general economic effectiveness, efficiency and impact of public policy actions for large investment programs of the kind implemented over the past fifteen years in EU-aided Structural Fund programmes. Far from being rigid, our...