A new paper titled “New Evidence on the Effects of EU Regional Policy” has just been published by Julia Bachtrögler-Unger, Mathias Dolls, Carla Krolage, Paul Schüle, Hannes Taubenböck and Matthias Weigand in EconPol Europe, which is CESifo’s economic policy platform.

This contribution is a short version of the paper Bachtrögler-Unger et al. (2023) specifically prepared for a policy forum. The researchers from the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) in Vienna, the ifo Institute in Munich, the University of Regensburg, the Earth Observation Center (EOC) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen, and our Earth Observation Research Cluster of the University of Würzburg present a novel approach to assess the effect of EU cohesion policy on economic activity. In the combination of project-level data on EU funding  and nighttime light emissions satellite data, it is found that higher EU funding is associated with increased economic activity at the municipal level. This study has been funded by the Bertelsmann Foundation.

Here is the abstract to this study:

EU Cohesion Policy constitutes an important item in the EU budget. For the Multiannual Financial Framework 2021–2027, EUR 392 billion is reserved for the promotion of economic and social cohesion among the regions of the European Union. This article presents results from a pilot study that combines official data on projects co-funded by the ERDF and the CF in the programming period 2007–2013, with remote sensing data on night light emission and land cover to assess the effect of EU funding on economic growth at the municipal level, where regional GDP data are not available. Our approach can also be applied in other contexts, for example to study the impact of investment projects funded by Next Generation EU.

Please find the full paper here: https://www.econpol.eu/publications/forum-2024-1-big-data-based-economic-insights/new-evidence-on-the-effects-of-eu-regional-policy

We have also reported on the original study of Bachtrögler-Unger et al. (2023) here: https://remote-sensing.org/new-publication-on-the-effects-of-eu-cohesion-policy-on-local-economic-activity/

The full paper of the original study can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046223000893