Guide to the galaxy of EU regional funds recipients: evidence from new data

Abstract

This study presents a new firm- and project-level dataset containing data on over two million projects co-funded by the EU structural and cohesion funds in 25 EU member states during the programming period 2007–2013. Information on individual beneficiary firms and institutions is linked with business data of Bureau van Dijk’s ORBIS database. Moreover, text mining techniques are applied to categorise the EU cohesion policy projects into fifteen thematic categories. Stylised facts reveal substantial regional heterogeneity in the distribution of funds to certain projects and beneficiaries (with respect to their size or industry). Furthermore, regional funds distribution differs across less developed and higher-income as well as urban and rural regions. In an econometric analysis, we control for project and firm characteristics that we expect to determine the single project’s value, which is confirmed by the results. Nevertheless, there remains unexplained variation in individual project volumes, which differs systematically across countries.