Brussels, 07/09/2015 (Agence Europe) - A Eurobarometer report published on Thursday 3 September regarding European citizens' awareness and perceptions of EU Regional policy, demonstrates that European action at regional level is still suffering from a lack of visibility.
In her comments on the results of the report, the Commissioner for Regional Policy, Corina Cretu, regretted that only a fifth of those interviewed in the survey knew that the EU invested regional funds in the area of cross-border cooperation. She said that this demonstrated that they still had a lot of work to do to promote Interreg programmes. Less than a third of respondents from the Baltic Sea region had any knowledge about European macro-regional strategy to develop cross-border cooperation. These rates are even lower in other macro-regions: 28% in the Adriatic and Ionian and 22% in the Danube region.
The rate of respondents claiming that they knew about Interreg illustrates significant disparities between the different countries and range from 54% in Latvia and 48% to Malta, to just 10% in France and Denmark.
Leaving aside the issue of cross-border co-operation, the results on European regional action are hardly more encouraging. Just over a third of those interviewed declared that they knew about the existence of EU co-funded projects in their respective regions. This rate has not changed since the first report on the same question in 2010. Just over half of those interviewed (49%) said that they knew about the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Cohesion Fund. In this connection, the results have fallen slightly compared to previous reports, point out the authors of the survey. Finally, just a fifth (21%) of those interviewed who knew about these funds acknowledged that they had personally benefited from European action at a regional level.
In this respect, the answers provided also vary significantly from one member state to another, ranging from more than three quarters of those interviewed in Poland (76%) asserting that they were aware of EU regional policies to less than a 10th in the United Kingdom.
Unsurprisingly, the main channels of communication, according to those interviewed, remained the television and newspapers amongst more elderly citizens and less educated sections of the population, while the Internet had become the preferred medium of choice among the younger generations and more educated people.
A lack of knowledge among European citizens about European policies remains a source of concern to the institutions, particularly because with spending of almost €352 billion (a third of the European budget for the 2014-2020 period) regional policy remains the main instrument for EU investment.
On 15 September next, the Luxembourg Presidency will celebrate 25 years of the Interreg initiative. The celebrations will be attended by Cretu, who will travel to Vienna a week later to attend the European cooperation day event. (Pascal Hansens)