By international comparison as well as compared to other EU policies, the EU‘s Cohesion Policy (CP) evaluation system is far developed and institutionalized. This paper analyses the remaining gaps and shortcomings in the CP evaluation system against principles established by the OECD and...

Independent and high-quality evaluations of government policies are an important input for designing evidence-based policy. Lack of incentives and institutions to write such evaluations, on the other hand, carry the risk of turning the system into a costly beauty contest. We study one of the...

Cohesion policy in the European Union (EU) has been widely accepted as a tool to advance the catch-up process, i.e., helping member countries with lower GDP per capita to grow faster economically in order to arrive at similarly high-income levels as member countries with higher GDP per capita....

In its current setup, the European Union is often characterised as slow, decision-impeding, inefficient and therefore not really ready for enlargement. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis and the increasingly uncertain role in the global economy have further increased the high...

This report addresses the legal aspects of how the EU’s Cohesion Policy has changed over the past decade, exploring the legal argumentation behind its transformation. Cohesion Policy used to be understood as a policy with distinct features and clear limits, characterised by its focus on...

With the aim of contributing to the ongoing discussions on the future of post-2027 Cohesion Policy (CP), this chapter delves into the functioning of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). It examines the interplay between the RRF and CP, illustrating their respective governance structures,...

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the results of regional economic growth estimates at multiple spatial scales using spatial panel data models. The spatial scales examined are minimum comparable areas, micro-regions, meso-regions and states over the period between 1970 and 2000. Alternative...

In the paper we analyze the convergence process of the West German Laender from 1970 to 1995 using descriptive tools as well as panel estimation methods. Although there have been some winners in this process, the main finding is that convergence was insufficient in the sense that no gains have...