This paper presents new evidence on the last concluded wave (2007-2013) of the EU cohesion policy. We depart from the broadly used GDP-growth approach and evaluate the impact of EU Structural Funds (SFs) on a battery of regional well-being indicators including economic, educational, health, and...

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) were established to attract entrepreneurs to invest in Polish regions in order to increase their social and economic development. One of the most important incentives offered in SEZs is state aid in the form of an income tax exemption. The objective of this paper is...

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...

More than one third of the European Union's total budget is spent on socalled Cohesion Policy via the structural funds. Its main purpose is to promote the development of the EU and to support convergence between the levels of development of the various European regions. Investigating the impact...

Regional governments' discretion in allocating structural funds is mainly limited by the competences of the Commission to control implementation and fiscal activities of decentralized governments. In this paper, we analyse implementation of ERDF funds in Eastern Germany in the financial...

Additionality is one of the key principles driving the functioning of the EU Cohesion Policies (ECP). The present paper studies how additionality affects the distributional effects of the ECP. Using the example of the firm-level investment support, we analyse the role of additionality and...

The study presented in the paper attempts to examine if the alleged effectiveness of the developmental funds - one of the main strategic tools of the EU - can be traced in the typical statistics provided by various authorities and organizations. The study focuses in the case of funds used in...

We assess the macroeconomic impact of the EU cohesion policy investments deployed during the 2014-2020 programming period, employing updated data on planned expenditures, which in most Member States will take place until 2023. We use the spatial dynamic general equilibrium RHOMOLO in order to...