Fertile Soil for Structural Funds? A panel data analysis of the conditional effectiveness of European cohesion policy

Structural funds are the most intensively used policy instrument by the European Union to promote economic growth in its member states and to speed up the process of convergence. This paper empirically explores the effectiveness of European Structural Funds by means of a panel data analysis for 13 countries in the European Union. We show that – on average – Structural Funds are ineffective. For countries with high-quality institutions, however, Structural Funds are effective. This result is obtained for several proxies for institutional quality and is robust for different estimation techniques (OLS, period- and country-specific fixed effects and dynamic panel data models).