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abstract
The latest successive enlargements to Central and Eastern European countries and their differentiated convergence raise the question of the effectiveness of the European structural funds that have been greatly enjoyed by such countries. The literature on this question is nevertheless not unanimous. I therefore offer an analysis of the cohesion policy and its role in regional growth specifically in Central and Eastern Europe, using a method developed in spatial analysis, namely, GWR (geographically weighted regression) at the NUTS 3 level. My findings reveal the existence of a multipolar convergence. The differentiated spatial variations of the influence of European funds on regional economic growth call for reorientation of the cohesion policy, especially in favor of a more territorialized policy.
Acknowledgments
I thank the four reviewers whose comments helped improve the quality of the article.
Notes
1 The AICc is a corrected version of the AIC used for small samples. This is the method I chose for my analysis.
2 Crescenzi and Giua (Citation2018) have recently reminded us that the methods for evaluating the cohesion policy should not just be focused on the impact on regional economic growth but also on employment growth. My study concentrates on economic growth, but it would be interesting if future studies could complete it by evaluating the effects on employment.
3 Note that, for my analysis, all the regions received European funds for the period in question. It was therefore impossible to conduct such an analysis, since I did not have any regions that had not been dealt with in my sample.
4 As I did not have data for this variable for the first year (2000), I chose to use the data generated in 2010.