Three funds for three objectives

270 administrative Regions are recognized by the European Union. To these can be added the Provinces, Communes and other forms of local authorities contemplated by the Constitutions of member states. These are the main players that – by various title and with different degrees of autonomy and power – participate in the regional and cohesion policy of the EU, which for the period 2007-2013 benefits from an overall budget of 347,410,063,883 Euros, equivalent to 35.7% of the Union’s global budget.The first objective – Following the recent reform approved by the European Council in 2006, the structural financial instruments that support regional development programmes and projects are now reduced to three: the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Cohesion Fund (CF). These Funds contribute to the realization of three objectives: convergence; regional competitiveness and employment; and European territorial cooperation. The aim of the Convergence Objective consists in promoting the conditions of socio-economic growth of the 100 Regions that in 21 member states present a GDP lower than, or just over, 75% of the EU average and that for this reason are considered less developed by virtue of the so-called “statistical effect” caused by enlargement. The Convergence Objective is endowed with a budget of € 282.8 billion, of which € 69.5 allocated by the Cohesion Fund and applicable only in 15 countries to the benefit of the most under-developed Regions: the projects eligible for funding are especially those regarding infrastructures. This is the only objective that benefits from the contribution of all three Structural Funds. The second objective. The regional competitiveness and employment objective intervenes in all the other Regions with the aim of reinforcing their European and international presence with a two-pronged approach: on the one hand, supporting regional programmes to anticipate and favour economic change through innovation, the promotion of the knowledge society, entrepreneurship, and environmental protection, while creating at the same time the conditions for the greater access to services on the part of the citizen, as well as improved conditions for businesses and the public administration: on the other, creating new and better quality jobs in compliance with the Lisbon Strategy thanks to the adaptation of the labour force and investments in human resources. The 168 Regions eligible for this objective in 19 member states dispose of an overall budget of € 55 billion. ERDF and ESF are the two Funds that finance the interventions. The third objective. European territorial cooperation is aimed at the reinforcement of cross-border cooperation through initiatives of cooperation, exchange of good practices and policy recommendations promoted and administered by the regional and local authorities. The 8.7 billion Euros placed at the disposal of this objective solely by the ERDF finance programmes and projects of cross-border and trans-national cooperation (subdivided into 13 macro-areas), and those of inter-regional cooperation.The countries that most benefit from investment of regional and cohesion policy are (in descending order) Poland (€ 67 billion), Spain (€ 35 billion), Italy (€ 29 billion), Czech Republic (€ 27 billion), Germany (€ 26 billion) and Hungary (€ 25 billion).What future? The EU institutions have now agreed on the need drastically to reform regional and cohesion policy from 2013 onwards, reducing the resources allocated to the Structural Funds in order to increase the ability of local authorities to decide on actions and programmes exclusively on the basis of competitive criteria. Thirty-three years since the birth of the European Regional Development Fund, Brussels in fact considers that the economic growth of the countries historically under-developed (Italy, Greece, Spain, Ireland) and of the new member states in Eastern Europe (Italy, Greece, Spain, Ireland) has reached, or will reach in the years ahead, a level such as to permit them to “stand on their own feet”, in Europe as in the world. The objectives of internal cohesion and development of the regional economies posed first by the Treaty of Rome and then by the European Single Act of 1986 require new instruments.Three forthcoming reviews. The task of the European Union will be that of reducing regional disparities – though these are tending to grow, not to decline – and helping member states to tackle the various international and domestic challenges they face. It will be interesting to evaluate what emerges from the 5th Report on the progress of economic and social cohesion (it will be published by the Commission in the spring), from the debate on the revision of EU financial perspectives after 2013 and from the Report on the regional scenarios on the horizon in 2020 that the European Commissioner for Regional Policy Danuta Hübner has announced for the end of the year. Info: http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/index_it.htm