R58 - Regional Development Planning and PolicyReturn

Analysing papers that reveal by decomposing territorial inequalities in the EU that the share of disparities attributed to the NUTS 3 level has increased over the last 20 years, this paper aims to examine to what extent the financial support in 2000-2006 from ERDF and CF, which are the main regional policy tools but mainly are directed to address the issues arising at the NUTS 2 level, contributed to supporting convergence at the NUTS 3 level. Our re-search strategy relies on combining a conditional β-convergence model and a difference-in-differences (DiD) estimator. Estimations are generated for four alternative post-policy periods, two ways to measure policy intervention and for different funds as well as different expenditure categories. Our research results bring to light the question of potential negative outcomes of the EU's existing regional policy since the policy that is focused on the NUTS 2 level is enlarging imbalances within these regions, i.e., among NUTS 3 regions.

The article deals with the strategically important problems of metropolisation. In this context, it presents a theoretically based method of assessment of metropolises, the explanatory power of which was verified on the example of the Central Europe. This method is based on three components: population size (initial assumption), economic profile (ties to economic performance) and general attractiveness (the perception of development potential). The results of the evaluation of the 27 identified metropolises were generalized using a typology of their inclusion within the framework of the listed components: most metropolises were classified as type B - an established metropolis, followed by type C - an elementary metropolis, and type A - a dominant metropolis. A practically targeted conceptualization is then demonstrated on the example of the Czech Republic. The main attention was focused on the intensity of the economic links of Prague (and two further Czech centres) with other Central European metropolises.

Efficiency, economy and effectiveness: outcomes and impacts of public expenditures are main issue especially from mid eighties, when massive changes in the public sector started, influencing both allocative and X-efficiency of public expenditures. Public expenditure programmes are implemented on many levels, from international to municipal, and in many different forms. In our paper, we decided to perform the analysis on the level of self-governing regions in the Czech Republic. We focus on the following dimensions of expenditure analysis: the scope and scale of allocative and regulatory public expenditure programmes in the region (from EU level programmes to regional); existing approaches used to analyse effectiveness of selected public expenditure programmes; impacts of public expenditure programmes on selected recipients (including capacity of recipients to apply for public resources - capacity to prepare projects to compete for public funds).