Effective Project Appraisal and Regional Development

In some countries EU Cohesion Policy (ECP) serves as the main source of policy investment for regional development. Consequently, the Project Appraisal effectiveness of ECP is crucial to fostering their regional development trends. However, our experience in analysing wide sets of ECP approved projects’ databases, in countries such as Portugal and Spain, reveal a somewhat lack of criteria in the selection of ECP financed projects. This might explain why several regions in both Iberian countries remain in the group of less development European Union (EU) regions, since both countries joined the currently known EU. In this context, the main goal of this project is to investigate the Project Appraisal process of ECP is in several EU member-states’ regions, covering all parts of Europe (South: Portugal and Spain; North: Finland and Denmark; West: Germany and Ireland; and East: Czechia and Hungary). The main objective of the proposed analysis is not only to unveil and compare the ‘administrative/institutional criteria’ used for the selection of EU Cohesion Policy implemented projects, but also ‘who’ (entity, political party, etc.) interferes in that selection. Ultimately, the project proposes to find potential co-relation causes for ‘regional development trends’ and the ‘project appraisal of ECP process’.