The EU said that at present, substantive deliberations and discussions are taking place on the future of cohesion policy, the problems of which are known to all member states. On information radio He is a research associate at the European Strategic Research Institute of the National University of Public Service.
“One problem is that the regions with the lowest level of development are the least able to benefit from EU catch-up funds,” Susanna Rica-Matti points out. A related problem is that when households are examined, the majority of the population benefits from income and employment cohesion, but those with higher education and higher incomes are better off than those with less education.
According to the expert, what helps is the fact that individual investments are often able to improve various indicators that measure the economic and social well-being of a region in the short term. This means that current cohesion policies do not lead in the direction of sustainable development, because if individual programmes are stopped, development will also be regressed.
Closely related is the theme that although the developmental differences between Member States are decreasing, it is very common for differences between regions of individual countries to increase, even though the main aim of cohesion policy is to make the less developed regions catch up.
There are several scenarios on the table of the European Commission.
According to the European Commission's idea, one of the solutions would be centralization – said Susana Rica Matthei. According to the expert, this means that the payment of the various cohesion funds would not be linked to the member states, but the European Commission would somehow directly supervise the payment, use and spending of these funds.
Another idea – and one closer to the heart of the German finance minister – is that these resources should be reduced overall, and the money from the individual funds should be used in a completely different way.
– The expert said. In the 2014-2020 cycle, Member States were able to use only 52.5% of the Cohesion Funds on average.
However, according to Susanna Rica-Mathe, there are significant differences in the use of cohesion funds across individual countries and regions. For example, certain regions in Italy, Spain, Greece, Croatia, Slovakia, Malta or Bulgaria have below-average payment indicators – precisely the countries for which we do not think it would be difficult to implement programmes that could be financed from these sources.
At the same time, some smaller countries, such as Hungary, Romania or the Czech Republic, can use the available funds more effectively, and so these regions will be the losers from the change.
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