Does EU Cohesion Policy affect territorial inequalities and regional development

We extend the literature on Cohesion Policy effectiveness by considering how the cohesion policy affects both within regional disparities and economic growth. For that purpose, a panel database of 205 NUTS2 regions of the UE-25 for 2000-2014 is used. We estimate panel data regressions with fixed effects and a spatial autoregressive term in order to control for unobservable characteristics and spatial dependence. Our results emphasize a trade-off between within and between regional disparities for EU-25 regions over the 2000-2014 period.