Do EU structural funds promote regional growth? New evidence from various panel data approaches

This paper analyses the economic growth effects of EU structural funds extending the current literature by at least three aspects: Firstly, we make use of a new structural funds dataset of 126 NUTS-1/NUTS-2 regions as well as more precise measures of structural funds by distinguishing between Objective 1, 2, and 3 payments. In doing so, we include the Financial Perspective 2000–2006, which has not been analysed before. Secondly, we address the problem of endogeneity in a panel context by basing the identification on internal instruments via a system GMM estimator. Finally, we control for spatial spillover effects by applying a spatial panel econometric estimator. Our results show that Objective 1 payments in particular do, in fact, promote regional economic growth, whereas the total amount of Objectives 1, 2, and 3 do not have a positive and significant impact on the EU regions' growth rates.