Brussels, 10/09/2014 (Agence Europe) - The Conference of Peripheral and Maritime Regions (CPMR) does not always share the same interpretation of regional policy reform and the benefits expected in the European Commission's 6th Cohesion Report. This subject was debated at the Cohesion Forum on 8-9 September.
The CPMR does not fully support the idea that the arsenal of new measures, such as the ex ante conditions and result indicators, will successively contribute to ensuring better results for European investment (see EUROPE 10985). The peripheral maritime regions say that they cannot rule out the risk of low absorption rates of structural funds due to too strict bureaucratic prerequisites for operational programme implementation.
The organisation has always been and still is critical of the method used in calculating structural fund allocation to the regions. Regional GDP does not accurately reflect the challenges faced by the regions, and the CPMR consequently recommends the use of the Commission's Joint Research Centre's regional competitiveness index. This criticism, however, does appear to have come to the attention of the outgoing Commissioner for Regional Development. In his closing speech on Tuesday 9 September at the Cohesion Forum, Johannes Hahn effectively recognised that one direction in which reflection could go in the future included the policy of analysing all the different dimensions of development difficulties in the allocation criteria and not just GDP.
The CPMR also regrets that the European Commission's report is based mainly on the principle that cohesion policy intervention should now be more geared towards correcting “human-influenced factors” and less towards geographical disadvantages. The CPMR believes that ignoring geographical characteristics in the mix is “alarming”. (MD)