AFTERMATH OF BREXIT FOR WALES

After withdrawal of the UK from the EU its Celtic regions (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales) faced a deterioration in the conditions for their socio-economic development and began to demand from B. Johnson to revise the principles of interaction between central government and local authorities in favor of expanding devolution. In Wales, separatist tendencies have not reached the same magnitude as in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Nevertheless, an acute confrontation arose at the intergovernmental level – the M. Drakeford’s Labour government protests against B. Johnson’s regional policy. The most acute contradictions arose against the background of the application of the UK Internal Market Act 2020 and the inability of the British government to compensate the region for the loss of subsidies from the EU structural funds after Brexit. To put pressure on the central government, Labour Party in Wales organized a special commission in October 2021 to consider separating the region from the United Kingdom and transferring additional powers to the local authority. This fact indicates the growth of a deep systemic crisis in the country, which makes the regions doubt the ability of the central government to effectively use its instruments to cope with the consequences of Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic.

Structural Funds and Regional Economic Growth: the Greek experience

The impact of structural funds of the European Union (EU) on regional economic growth is a matter of both political and economic importance. The large and regular payments made across the EU to countries and regions within them were and are meant to promote various aspects of growth and development and to encourage structural changes that foster investments and economic reforms. But how much of these aims have they been achieved? In this paper we provide considerable empirical evidence that Greek regions have, for the most part, benefited by the various disbursements of EU structural funds. We shed partial light on where this funding went to and to how it potentially contributed to Greek growth but we also raise a number of questions about the viability of the current productive structure of the Greek economy and its over-reliance on tourism. Our results provide support on the efficacy of the payments but leave open the problem of where these payments should be allocated, the monitoring of their absorption and the end impact in the economic cycle within a country.

The Impact of Financial Innovation Investment Support on SME Competitiveness

This article examines financial support (especially EU Structural Funds as the main tool of cohesion policy) for investments as a lever for the development of SME innovativeness in Poland. The European Commission strongly stresses the importance of their cohesion policy and support for SMEs. European enterprises have suffered significantly from the credit crunch, and the situation could worsen as banks engage in restructuring to eliminate impaired assets from their balance sheets. Supporting SMEs and promoting entrepreneurship is essential for economic development and competitiveness, especially in less developed regions. The main aim of this study is to establish the impact of financial support for investments, especially from EU Structural Funds, on SME competitiveness in Poland. We have analyzed empirically the data drawn from CATI carried out among 805 firms. We have learned how SMEs assess the financial support from different sources along with the resulting impact on the competitiveness of SMEs. The main statistical test for relationships and dependencies was the chi-square independence test and Cramer’s V. The results of our research show that SMEs have not used financial support efficiently. Moreover, micro-enterprises were shown to be the least effective after receiving financial support from EU funds. This support often has a demand-driven effect, but it does not improve firm competitiveness.

Academic engagement with small business and entrepreneurship: Towards a landscape of practice

Academic engagement with small business and entrepreneurship was facilitated by the availability of European Union (EU) funding, which also stimulated the emergence of a small business and entrepreneurship (SBE) ‘community of practice’. Gradually, the SBE community developed into a ‘landscape of practice’ as small business research moved towards maturity. Furthermore, the SBE landscape of practice has coalesced around three core concepts: entrepreneurial learning, social networks and social capital. EU funding was the catalyst for many SBE academics in the UK to engage with practitioners involved with starting and managing their own businesses. The UK’s exit from the EU will inevitably mean that universities will no longer have access to EU Structural Funds. This has major implications for the UK SBE community’s engagement with practice as well as for entrepreneurs and business owners who have benefitted from a range of programmes designed to improve the performance of smaller firms.

The Efficiency of Financing the Regional Smart-Specialization Strategies’ Implementation from the EU Structural Funds

The paper provides the empirical analysis of the efficiency of financing the regional smart-specialization strategies’ implementation from the structural funds in the context of its impact on the improvement of economic wellbeing and prevention of growing regional misbalances in the EU at the NUTS 2 level. It verifies the inverse correlation between the GRP volumes per capita in the EU Member States and the volumes of funding of the smart-specialization activities. The financial resources of the EU structural funds for the implementation of the regional smart-specialization strategies are established to be distributed on a regional basis and to be showing the signs of the aligning policy, which is a reasonable tactic from the viewpoint of the need to secure the balanced spatial development. However, the paper emphasizes that the less developed regions aren’t able to fully generate powerful innovations that would boost the economic activity in the smart-specialization domains yet.

Development Finance in the Baltic States and the Process of Europeanization

The Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, where European structural funds make up the lion share of national budgets, provides an opportunity to study how “development financing” is defined and operationalized in the context of dependency on external financing from the European Union (EU). The three Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) represent a region with a particular socio-political history, similar economic structures and equally similar asymmetrical relations with the EU, which makes the entire notion of development finance institutions quite different from existing “strategic” qualities attributed to promotional banks as discussed in current literature. We aim to demonstrate that policy trajectories, largely shaped by the EU, and especially an overdependence on EU structural funds, result in a set of incentives that hinder the development of a more strategic approach to economic policies and policy-related finance in particular. We also argue that bureaucratic competences developed within such a context of external financing resemble a “managerial” type of Development Finance Institutions rather than “strategic” investing agents.

Major changes affecting EU funded loan and equity scheme management in 2021-2027 budgetary period

Approximately ten percent of support from the European Union structural funds sources was utilised as financial instruments in the 2014-2020 EU budgetary period. The term ‘financial instruments’ represents support in the form of loans and capital injections in Hungary. Programmes for 2021-2027 have not been finalised yet, but major amounts of money are expected to be used in the form of financial instruments. Therefore, one should review the changes affecting the criteria to use EU structural funds, which determine development policies in the next period regarding loan and equity schemes. Both the EU and the Hungarian regulatory framework have been established, they can be studied and used as the starting point of further planning. In this paper the major components of the relevant regulatory framework including its practical conclusions to be expected are discussed.