Achim Kemmerling, in a post over at the EUROPP blog, argues that because of the way they are spent, it was “perhaps naive to expect that structural funds policy should have an immediate and direct influence on regional growth“.

However, looking for one of the bases for these finding, on finds interesting contradictions with other research:

“[W]e find that federalist regions get more Objective-1 transfers than others. This might be due to several reasons; for instance, better administrative capacities. But we think it is also because these regions are more successful in lobbying both the national and, in particular, the EU level.”

The findings by Lisa Maria Dellmuth, which I presented in a past blog post, imply the opposite:

“[The empirical record does not support the expectation that the Commission allocates more transfers to strong regions, which contradicts previous studies on the lobbying power of regions with strong legal–constitutional positions at the EU level”

As far as I can see, non of the papers cited in Achim Kemmerling’s post actually address this contradiction, and I wonder why he wouldn’t use the opportunity of a blog post to actually discuss this…