Regionalisation of ESIF payments 1989-2015

Summary:

The yearly breakdown of expenditure included in the consolidated financial dataset of ESIF payments 1989-2015 follows the cycle of the European Commission payments to the Member States and not the dates in which expenditures took place on the ground. This characteristic may negatively affect the analytic work subsequently done by the experts to carry out policy assessments or to run counterfactual impact evaluations estimating the effects of the varying intensities of the EU funds on regional growth variables. The misalignment between COM reimbursement cycle and date of the interventions on the ground (beneficiaries’ expenditures) may represent a disturbance acting either as a noise or as a bias. The purpose of the study entrusted to the University of Bergen is to: Build a framework of the beneficiaries’ yearly expenditures on the basis of the specific COM-payment patterns balanced to the different NUTS2 areas; Verify the robustness of the framework developed by performing an overall quality check of the model through uncertainty analysis and global sensitivity analysis.