Search

In the EU, a sizable part of innovation is attributed to the activities other than R&D such as purchases of advanced machinery, licenses, patents and minor modifications in products or processes. These non-R&D innovation activities receive substantial funding from the European cohesion policy (ECP). In this paper we applied the dynamic spatial computable general equilibrium model RHOMOLO to evaluate the ex-ante short and long run economic impacts of 2014-2020 non-R&D innovation subsidies allocated to the EU27 NUTS2 regions. The results of computer simulations show that the most notable welfare improvements (GDP, production and household consumption) were observed in the Eastern EU regions that receive the largest share of funding. Such outcome is in line with the goals of the European Cohesion Policy of stimulating economic convergence of the least developed regions. As was expected, the magnitude of macroeconomic impacts positively correlates with the amount of non-R&D subsidies allotted to the regions.

This paper evaluates whether the learning mechanisms of the European Cohesion policy have contributed to improve the economic impact of Structural Fund expenditure over time. It analyses whether the evolution of the policy in response to greater internal monitoring and external scrutiny has resulted in a more efficient and better targeted Cohesion policy. This is tested using an econometric model which evaluates the effect of Structural Fund expenditure on the growth of regional GDP per capita —conditional on factor endowments, institutional quality and initial conditions— during the last programming periods for which full sets of data are available (1994-1999 and 2000-2006). The results of the analysis unveil an increase in the effectiveness of the policy in successive periods. This positive association is robust to controlling for the level of development of the country and the relative economic position of a region within a country. The results also show that, when structural factors are taken into consideration, Structural Fund investment tends to yield higher returns in better-off countries and wealthier regions within countries

The problems for the Russian gas supply to the EU in 2006 and2009 raised the question on the relationship between these areas. The EU includes Russia in its energy policy, but as a geopolitical risk. The ground of this view is the big volume of hydrocarbons that the EU imports form Russia that implies a dependency of the former. It is assumed that Russia can influence the prices, the quantities, as well as the capability for restructuring the European gas sector. Nevertheless, this view doesn’t consider the role of the gas in Russia and, in particular, the Russian gas export strategic value from the Russian view. This paper questions that Russia could use the gas export to EU as a political vector and, by the way, proposes the geopolitical risk to have a minor relevance. So in the European energy policy the geopolitical risk of Russia should lose importance and should increase the priority about the absence of investments in the Russian gas sector that can establish limits to the imports of Russian gas in the future.

This paper uses a New Economic Geography model to test for wagedisparities in the European Union. We derive and estimate an econometric specificationrelating wages to a distance weighted sum of regional GDP’s. The empirical estimationsof the model were carried out for a sample of 160 NUTS2 regions in theEU15 for the year 2000 showing that geography of access to markets is statisticallysignificant and quantitatively important in explaining cross-region variation in Europeanwages. We also show that incentives for human capital accumulation and innovationactivities arising from market access size are also affecting the shaping of regionalwages in the European Union.

In this paper the monitoring of the Lisbon Strategy is analysed. In orderto do that, in a first stage a summary of the Lisbon Strategy is made, with ananalysis of its objectives, list of structural indicators and an overall evaluation. Abrief summary is made on the relaunch of the Agenda and on its consequences on thereform of the Cohesion Policy. In a second stage, we develop an analysis of the structuralindicators evolution against general economic background indicators both atcross section and temporal dimensions, focusing on economic growth. In this sense,the analysis made by the Commission is complemented with a discussion about theimplications that the evolution of these indicators may have on economic growth.This would provide a richer explanation on the role that these aspects are having inEU development and growth.