Mannah from Brussels? The EU Regional Policy and its Structural and Cohesion Funds

Summary:

This first paper has been written in order to lay the basis of the section “Europe with Regions”. It represents a functional description of the evolution, main actors, mechanisms, objectives, principles, instruments of the EU Regional Policy preceded by general concepts and definitions inserted in the paper in order to facilitate an as deep as possible comprehension of the material. Even if I used several scientific sources for this paper, and to a smaller extent mass media information, it cannot be considered a scientific paper, more an instrument which gathers together reasonably numerous details about the most relevant aspects of the RP. Each of these aspects can be and will be developed in future articles.

The paper will start by enunciating some general notions, basic concepts and definitions needed in the following pages. Most of these are controversial in the scientific world, nevertheless I chose one (as neutral, simple but consistent as possible) which can be considered a “work definition”, it can be used to understand most of the literature on this subject.