In her speech at the 9th Cohesion Forum, held on Thursday 11 and Friday 12 April in Brussels, the Commissioner for Cohesion, Elisa Ferreira, stressed the need to look to the future and see “how we can improve Cohesion Policy”.
She pointed out that many regions have lower levels of development, under 75% of the EU average. “There are still many imbalances, many regions with massive problems of development”, she stressed.
The data also shows that some of the countries and regions experiencing rapid growth are doing so on the basis of a significant internal imbalance. “This is due to a suction effect, where more developed areas ‘hoover up’ the highest performing companies, the more sophisticated technologies, the best opportunities for jobs and education, the best research, the best innovation”, explained Ms Ferreira. In her view, what is needed is to learn how to better combine the different strengths of large cities, mid-sized and small towns and rural areas.
In addition, as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, around a third of the EU’s regions, home to 150 million people, have yet to return to their 2008 GDP per capita levels.
According to Elisa Ferreira, the biggest proportion of EU aid should go to the regions that have the least means to support themselves, and this requires “a different kind of support to the middle-income places to help them not to fall in these development traps as well as to the more developed areas so that they build on their strength and carry the rest of the economy with them”.
She suggested a greater focus on reforms (taking inspiration from the Recovery and Resilience Facility) to target support.
The President of the European Committee of the Regions (CoR), Vasco Alves Cordeiro, stressed that if “we do not mobilise and defend a common vision of a renewed policy for all regions, based on its fundamental principles, we run the risk of ending up with a Cohesion Policy in name only. And this poses a threat to the European Union project as a whole”. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)