Rationale and design of EU cohesion policies in a period of crisis

Abstract

The paper reflects on justifications for, and the proper design of, cohesion policies in a period of deep economic recession. In particular, the paper tackles two important topics. The first concerns the justification for EU regional policies in a period of economic downturn, since they may seem less urgent and appropriate than short term demand policies. Instead, as the paper argues, the crisis exerts considerable pressure on several EU countries, and may even, in the worst case, jeopardize two decades of efforts towards EU enlargement and cohesion. In this circumstance, regional policies are required to rebalance the spatial effects that the ongoing crisis is determining on interregional convergence trends, in strict relationship with some new monetary and fiscal policy tools agreed at the EU level lifting the pressure that present austerity measures are exerting on many, mainly Southern, European countries. The second topic relates to the most appropriate design that cohesion policies should follow, building in a critical way on the results of the robust policy debate of the last decade. The message that the paper conveys from a conceptual point of view is that the winning strategy is neither to focus on champion places and regions, in search of the highest efficiency, nor on lagging areas only, in search of equity, but on the development potential of all places, represented by its territorial capital – material, human, cognitive, social and relational. Policies should be tailored on each region's specificities, competitive advantage and needs, engaging all possible assets and enlarging existing excellences. This pathway simultaneously avoids the social and economic costs of a concentrated development and is able to guarantee the highest returns in terms of both competitiveness and cohesion. The paper concludes by proposing suggestions on how to respond to the specific and particular challenges that the New Member countries of the EU are now facing, on the basis of the previous conceptual and empirical evidence.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 71 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.