Defenders of suburban sprawl assert that sprawl is inevitable in affluent societies, based on trends in Western Europe. According to supporters of this Inevitability Theory, European cities have decentralized and become more car-dependent, thus proving that even where governments are more...

Household waste generated is often uncolleted in rural areas causing various types of pollution like: air and water pollution, soil pollution and the aesthetic degradation of the landscape. The environmental legislation proposed by the European Union was transposed on the national legislation...

This article considers the relationship between centralised, exogenous institutions and the embedded, endogenous institutions of rural governance in Europe through an examination of the evaluation procedures of the European LEADER programme. LEADER is presented in the literature as progressive...

Cohesion policy micro-efficiency is determined by institutional or absorption capacity of recipient regions and Member States which, in turn, co-determines the policy's macro-economic impact. The analysis shows that cohesion policy is not perceived as an quot;EU receipts maximising...

The paper shows that delivery mechanisms have significant impact on the effectiveness of cohesion policy whatever its structure. In the assessment of the present delivery mechanisms the conclusion is made that there are strong arguments for reform, which however would make sense even if one...

In the past three decades, total quality management (TQM) has been appreciated as “fundamental modality in view to improve the activity in the public and private sectors” (Boyne and Walker, 2002, 1). For the time being, in public administrations, we witness an extension of the policies for...

I study place based policies under local political economy constraints, asking whether transfers across regions can foster regional convergence. I show that, if local workers can vote over the within-region allocation of the transfers, these may be spent unproductively and be ineffective in...

This study investigates whether there is a link between the successful implementation of European co-hesion policy and the voters' attitudes towards the EU. Using the French presidential elections in 2017 as a case study, we do not solely consider regional funds expenditures but also its induced...

The aim of this chapter is to provide empirically supported evidence regarding regional development and inequalities in the European Union by focusing specifically on the Central and Eastern European countries. The process of European integration has impacted on the growth potential of all...

This paper shows that regional policies can decrease populist support. We focus on the "development objective" (Objective-1) of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), meant to support lagging-behind regions. For causal inference, we exploit three sources of quasi-exogenous variation in a...