Change in Regional Policy Priorities, Objectives and Instruments in Greece

There has been more than twenty years of regional planning financed by EU Structural Funds since 1986, when the first Integrated Mediterranean Programmes were implemented in Greece. Throughout this period, successive regional programmes have stated their overall priorities, their social, spatial and sectoral objectives, their means of intervention and the available public resources. In this chapter, we attempt an ex-post assessment of how this officially-stated, regional policy evolved and how it matured, expanded or completely changed over the said period. We examine the contents of 39 regional programmes, covering all the Greek planning regions, by engaging in a comparative analysis of programme objectives, instruments and resource allocations. More specifically, we make comparisons between three consecutive planning periods covered by the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Community Support Frameworks for Objective 1 regions. Our emphasis is both on the relative weight of the economic sectors, and on the hierarchy and content of intrasectoral objectives and policy measures. Amongst the main findings of our work is the fact that basic infrastructure and agriculture remain an overwhelming priority in almost all the programmes, that significant deficits in resource concentration and internal programme cohesion have not been corrected and that innovative and technology oriented measures are the least integrated in programme interventions. Finally, the spatial allocation of funds is also examined, revealing modest change in the geography of priorities over the period concerned.