2. The Puzzle of Absorption Problems in Central and Eastern Europe

The funds’ impact on convergence is controversial anyway (Bachtler and Gorzelak 2007: 313–315).

The Council Regulation will be in the following referred to as ‘CR’, together with the respective article quoted.

The MA can outsource some of its tasks to so-called intermediary bodies. These IBs then perform the tasks for the MA, however, the MA still remains ultimately responsible for implementation.

There are three different types of payments: pre-financing payments, interim payments, and the payment of the final balance. Pre-financing is spread over the first years of the financing period and set at a fixed level. The share of funding to be received differs between new and old member states as well as funds. For the new member states, pre-financing from the structural funds was set at 2% in both 2007 and 2009, and 3% in 2008 (CR Art. 82, 1b). The same accounts for the cohesion fund at 2.5% in 2007, and 4% in both 2008 and 2009 (CR Art. 82, 1e). The interim payments are usually studied when it comes to absorption. Interim payments are those funds reimbursed on the basis of actual implementation. They are therefore of prime interest to this study as they mean actual implementation on the ground. The final balance is 5% of the total allocation and is only paid after programme-closure (CR Art. 89).

They are not sufficient, however, as interim payments also depend on transmitting correct applications for reimbursement to the EC which need prior projects to be implemented.

Tasks of both the MA and CA may also be transferred partially to so-called intermediate bodies to perform their tasks. These intermediate bodies work, however, still under the general authority of the specific MA or CA (CR Art. 59, 2).

See McCann (2015: 64–65) for an overview of probably all existing studies of cohesion policy’s effectiveness.

Cyprus and Malta are (just like in most other post-accession studies) not considered in this analysis. Overall, the two island-nations are difficult to compare to the CEE countries when it comes to the challenges they face, especially with regard to their historical trajectories. In addition, Cyprus does not even receive convergence support from the EU, and is thus anyway no possible case.

The 2004 entrants to the EU could already participate for two years in the earlier financing period from 2004–2006.

Cohesion policy is implemented in distinct thematic operational programmes at the level of the member states. See Sect. 4.​2 for a detailed discussion of why these 17 programmes were selected for analysis, and Sect. 4.​3 on how the differentiation between successful and less successful programmes is established on the basis of qualitative and quantitative criteria.

Spendzharova and Versluis criticize, for example, that it is not possible to make a distinction between Spain and Bulgaria, even though qualitative evidence would strongly recommend doing so (Spendzharova and Versluis 2013: 1508).

Support for administrative capacities was also found in other fields of EU implementation studies. The expectation of a positive influence of high capacities on implementation success is (at least among other variables) confirmed by the majority of studies for transposition (Berglund et al. 2006: 706; Kaeding 2006: 244; Haverland and Romeijn 2007: 776; Toshkov 2007: 346; Spendzharova and Versluis 2013: 1512), practical implementation (Falkner et al. 2004: 459; Falkner et al. 2005: 302), and infringements (Mbaye 2001: 274; Perkins and Neumayer 2007: 198; Börzel et al. 2010: 1379; Börzel et al. 2012: 465), even if not always significant (König and Maeder 2013: 53; König and Mäder 2014: 257) or sufficient (but see Siegel 2006: 20; Thomson 2007: 1002; Milio 2008; Dimitrova and Toshkov 2009: 12; Steunenberg and Toshkov 2009: 964; Thomson 2010: 591 for no or negative results).

Tosun uses the percentage-change in GDP between 2007 and 2008 (Tosun 2014: 378). However, the crisis hit CEE countries most strongly in 2009. It is therefore likely that the crisis had not reached all countries yet and had only later an effect on their financial capacities (see Sect. 3.​3 on this matter).