Do EU structural funds promote regional employment? Evidence from dynamic panel data models
Abstract
Despite its rather broad goal of promoting “economic, social and territorial cohesion”, the existing literature has mainly focused on investigating the Cohesion Policy’s growth effects. This ignores the fact that part of the EU expenditures is directly aimed at reducing disparities in the employment sector. Against this background, the paper analyses the impact of EU structural funds on employment drawing on a panel dataset of 130 European NUTS regions over the time period 1999-2007. Compared to previous studies we (i) explicitly take into account the unambiguous theoretical propositions by testing the conditional impact of structural funds on the educational attainment of the regional labour supply, (ii) use more precise measures of structural funds for an extended time horizon and (iii) examine the robustness of our results by comparing different dynamic panel econometric approaches to control for heteroscedasticity, serial and spatial correlation as well as for endogeneity. Our results indicate that high-skilled population in particular benefits from EU structural funds. JEL Classification: R11, R12, C23, J20.Download Info
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Paper provided by European Central Bank in its series Working Paper Series with number 1403.Length: 46 pages
Date of creation: Dec 2011
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ecb:ecbwps:20111403
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Related research
Keywords: EU structural funds; dynamic panel models; spatial panel econometrics; regional employment effects.;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- R11 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes
- R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)
- C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Longitudinal Data; Spatial Time Series
- J20 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - General
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2012-01-03 (All new papers)
- NEP-EEC-2012-01-03 (European Economics)
- NEP-EUR-2012-01-03 (Microeconomic European Issues)
- NEP-GEO-2012-01-03 (Economic Geography)
- NEP-URE-2012-01-03 (Urban & Real Estate Economics)
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