Brussels, 19/11/2014 (Agence Europe) - The new European Commissioner for Regional Development, Corina Cretu, is focusing all her attention on the EU's less developed regions that are absorbing too few structural funds.
At the end of the General Affairs Council on Cohesion Policy, she expressed her wish to, “examine the underlying dynamic in the poorest regions where growth is at its lowest, in an effort to reverse this trend”. Cretu summed up the situation by explaining that the countries concerned are characterised by structural fund absorption rates that are too low (for 2007-2013) and that they either joined the EU late and made progress by receiving European funding or that they had been receiving money for '25 years' without citizens noticing any difference. Based on this observation, the Commissioner believes that only good governance and a good administrative and institutional capacity will allow these countries and regions to reverse this trend. She intends to help these countries whose absorption rates are less than 65% and says that she is optimistic that there will not be any big amounts of funding lost. To this end, the Commissioner announced that she would be setting up a task force that would be expected to draw up action plans, exchange good practices and reconfigure the administrative bottlenecks. Bilateral meetings between the Commissioner and some of the countries concerned are expected to take place over the next few weeks, “to find a solution to this funding that has not been taken up”, explained Cretu. (MD)