The EU cohesion policy and regional economic convergence

Abstract

The European Union (EU) cohesion policy is a prominent EU policy, and forms a major part of the EU budget. Since a lot of funds go to cohesion policy, it is vital that research is done to see whether it attains its predominant goal and leads to regional economic convergence. Although there are multiple scholarly articles available that analyse the link between cohesion policy and regional economic convergence, most of these articles provide an outdated assessment of the issue. Thus, this research seeks to provide an updated overview of the link by using the latest programming periods and data from Eurostat to answer the following research question: Is EU cohesion policy leading to regional economic convergence? In order to do so, a mixed method research approach is utilised which combines a qualitative approach and a quantitative approach. With the qualitative approach, the existing literature is analysed through reviewing key studies on the topic of my research to examine differing conclusions on cohesion policy and regional economic convergence. Therefore, the qualitative approach is used to contribute to examining the link between cohesion policy and regional economic convergence by assessing previous literature to discern if particular factors drive discrepant results. The quantitative analysis consists of Pearson correlation coefficients and two sets of t-tests. This analysis sheds a positive light on the effectiveness of cohesion policy in attaining regional economic convergence, since the Pearson correlation coefficients and two sets of t-tests show evidence of regional economic convergence for 223 regions analysed in the programming periods 2007-2013 and 2014-2020, as well as the period 2007-2017. Therefore, the quantitative analysis shows that cohesion policy attains regional economic convergence. The qualitative analysis shows that factors such as time period, coverage and estimation method can drive the results in studies that analyse cohesion policy and regional economic convergence. This analysis shows the importance of taking such factors into account when evaluating the effectiveness of cohesion policy.