ABSTRACT. This paper deals with the topic of monetary support of the European Union cohesion policy to two Central European countries the Czech Republic and Poland. The main area of the interest is the spatial dispersion of said resources among regions of each country as it is related to special intervention areas that were delimited in both of them. The idea behind this delimitation is rather similar in both countries, targeting the economically less advanced areas. The results of virtually the same approach, however, are quite different as they are obtained through different implementation of cohesion policy. Poland is rather more successful in targeting economically weakest regions as the government prepared an architecture of operational programmes that allocates significant amount to the economically weak Eastern Poland ex-ante through regional and multi-regional operational programmes. The Czech government, lacking similar approach, is far less efficient in targeting economically weak regions. What both countries have in common is the worrying trend to invest prevalently into basic infrastructure in these regions and implementing projects with larger added value in economically sounder areas.Keywords: cohesion policy, Czech Republic, European Union, Poland, spatial concentration, regional policy.JEL Classification : O22, R12, R51, R58IntroductionThe European Union cohesion policy is firstly aimed at the support of the underdeveloped regions. As the eligibility to either of the Convergence or the Regional Competitiveness and Employment objective is measured at the NUTS 2 level via the gross domestic product per capita, some countries emerge from this Union wide comparison as comprised mostly of the underdeveloped regions that occupy significant amount of their area and encompass also majority of the population (Becker et al., 2010, Barcalente and Perugini, 2010). Such broad delimitation of problem areas does not comply with the proclaimed principle of concentration of the cohesion policy interventions which should ensure the spatial, topical and expenditure concentration to improve the intervention results although some (e. g. Farole et al., 2011) propose that economic growth promotion policies should not target special territories. However, the economic growth is not the sole objective of the cohesion policy which also has a social and an environmental dimension (Mairate, 2006).The question of delimitation of the intervention areas for the cohesion policy has long been discussed especially with focus on the power division between the European Commission and the group of member states. The current practice in programming period 2007-2013 is such that the Convergence objective eligible regions are determined by the European Commission ruling (Bachtler and Mendez, 2007). Although the following programming period 2014-2020 signifies wide changes in the territorial approach more focused on specific functional types of regions be it macro-regions such as Baltic Sea or Danube or smaller sized functional areas centred around cities, urban areas, and so on (Zuber, 2013).The efficiency of the cohesion policy has been disputed (see e.g. Dall'Erba and Le Gallo, 2007, or Ederveen et al., 2006) as well as the convergence of the member states with different outcomes (Simionescu, 2014 or Vonjovic and Oplotnik, 2008). Bachtler and Gorzelak (2007) suggested maximising the effectiveness of the intervention especially in the Convergence regions by implementing widespread national policies that would further stipulate the use of eligible funds. In the light of this suggestion the paper compares the Eastern European member states the Czech Republic and Poland which have taken different approaches to delimitating the intervention areas at the national level and discusses their success in aiming interventions financed by the cohesion policy into said areas.The objective of the paper lies in evaluation of the spatial dispersion of the cohesion policy in the Czech Republic and Poland. …