Abstract
Amidst concerns about the effectiveness of the EU Structural Funds and discoveries of their unintended effects, could it be that they also undermine trust in politicians in the recipient regions? To find out, this paper estimates regression discontinuities at the two per-capita GDP thresholds, which determine regions’ eligibility for the convergence objective and phasing-out transitional support. Data used for estimation pertain to the NUTS 2 regions of the EU-15 Member States and the 2007–2013 programming period. Receipt of the EU Structural Funds leaves the share of citizens expressing trust in politicians unaffected but increases the share of those expressing distrust. In the phasing-out regions, this increase amounts to eight percentage points on average. The causal distrust-increasing effect of EU resources is driven by the regions of Greece, which experienced severe economic turmoil during the period under investigation.
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Source: Own calculations; data on payments from the ESIF Open Data Portal, population and inflation figures from Eurostat. Note: ‘PP’ stands for programming period
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Dataset compiled from publicly available sources. The author is open to sharing the compiled dataset in a public repository upon publication.
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Notes
The question for social trust reads ‘Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?’ The scale runs from zero (can’t be too careful) to ten (most people can be trusted).
This variable covers a shorter period than the outcome variable and the other control variables. Consideration was given to including the next available 2017 EQI wave into the average for greater overlap with the period of the disbursement. However, as one reviewer pointed out, it is problematic if a control variable spans a longer period than the outcome variable. Therefore, eqi-1013 is used in the estimation results reported. Nonetheless, estimates of the treatment effect throughout the paper are robust to using eqi-1017 in place of eqi-1013.
The variable treat equals one for both convergence and phasing out regions. However, the optimal bandwidth for no-trstplt-1016 at the 82.47% threshold is such that only phasing-out regions remain in the sample below the cut-off.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Jan Pavel and Monika Junicke for helpful suggestions. The paper was prepared as one of the outputs of the research project of the Faculty of Finance and Accounting of the University of Economics “Economic and Institutional Aspects of Public Finance” registered by the Internal Grant Agency of the University of Economics, Prague under the Registration Number F1/7/2019.
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Communicated by Fritz Breuss.
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Tomankova, I. The EU Structural Funds and trust in politicians: another unwanted outcome?. Empirica 49, 439–460 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10663-021-09524-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10663-021-09524-7