R&D and Innovation Support in the Evolving EU Cohesion Policy

We provide an overview of how EU cohesion policy has evolved over time, and how the changing economic environment has provoked adjustments of priorities from one EU budget period to another. We then focus on how the EU’s expenditure on cohesion policy has changed as a result of adjustments to cohesion policy priorities. We conclude that, apart from some institutional weaknesses related to the steadily changing promotion activities and eligible areas, as well as violation of the subsidiarity principle when developing strategies, a lack of transparency hinders an exact assessment of how much the EU actually spends on cohesion policies in total and makes it rather difficult to compare cohesion policy spending across the different EU budget periods.