Abstract

The European regional development policy, also known as Cohesion Policy, is one of the pillars of European Union integration, alongside the single market and the monetary union. Its primary objective is to address economic and social disparities in less developed regions. However, while the ex-post evaluation of the Policy effects has devoted considerable effort to the assessment of regional growth per capita, other important development outcomes have received little analysis. This study seeks to fill this gap by evaluating the distributive causal effect of the regional policy for the period 2000-2020. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we implement a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to identify the effect on the Gini index and quintile shares of income. Preliminary results indicate that the Policy had no distributive effect on treated regions within the programming periods under scrutiny.

This seminar is part of the (LIS)2ER Initiative.