Public Investments from EU Cohesion Policy in Slovakia: A Regional Perspective

In the last eight years the Cohesion policy has been the main source of public investments in Slovakia. The aim of the paper is to show the regional and thematic distribution of Cohesion policy interventions in Slovakia at the end of 2014 and examine the role of these interventions on nature of regional policy. The paper is based on microdata on final beneficiaries of EU funds from the Information and Monitoring System (ITMS) system which are broken down to NUTS 3 level. The expenditure is further broken down by the methodology used by the European Commission which provides a more detailed picture of the thematic distribution of interventions in the Slovak regions. We show relationship between Cohesion policy interventions and regional GDP. Especially in the first years of implementation the majority of expenditure was spend in least developed regions. However, in 2013 and 2014 the EU spending was focused mainly on large infrastructure projects, which distorted the character of conducted regional policy, while the majority of EU funds were spent in regions which are not among the least developed. The need to use these financial resources crowded out the focus on least developed regions.