Francesco Molica

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After three years of debating how to best mimic the US IRA, EU discussions are now shifting to how to keep pace with Trump’s deregulation spree.

Maybe, instead of chasing every economic trend from across the pond, Europe should be a bit more serious about crafting a strategy that works for itself.

One topic featuring prominently in the debate on future cohesion policy is how to make it more performance based. But are cohesion policy programmes ready for this shift? Which challenges they may face? We give some anwers in this recent paper: investigacionesregionales.org/wp-content/u...

How to break Europe’s innovation stasis www.socialeurope.eu/how-to-break...

January’s issue of #JCMS has arrived! 🚨

Editors @cardwellpj.bsky.social, @rguerrina.bsky.social & @gabrielsilesb.bsky.social have curated another insightful edition exploring new perspectives on #EuropeanStudies. 🌍

Dive into the open-access issue➡️ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14685965...

In other words, less obligations resulted in a more centralised governance at the expense of local/regional authorities role in managing the funds but the domestic distribution of the funds across regions did not change much.

The findings of the paper on this specific aspect are interesting: compared to standard cohesion policy funds, REACT-EU resources have been massively channeled to national programmes, but there is little difference in terms of territorial concentration.

As REACT-EU due to its exceptional nature was exempted from many cohesion policy core requirements, its investigation gives a hint of how cohesion policy funds would work if the multi-level governance and territorial earmarking legal obligations were not in place.

The Role of Electoral Interests in the National Distribution of EU Covid‐19 Funds Expectations are high regarding the impact of the extensive Covid-19 crisis support ‘Next Generation EU’. Mixed experiences from established EU distributive policies indicate, though, that ultimate p...

Very interesting article on the JCMS looking into Member States’ funding strategies related to REACT-EU, the NextGenerqtionEU top-up to cohesion policy funds (small thread)

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

#OpenAccess: "In this paper, we shed light on the variegated nature of ‘left behind’ regions through a cluster analysis of NUTS-3 regions in the EU15."

Important new #OpenAccess paper on #LeftBehind #Regions by Velthuis et al. (authors below) - www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Why a challenge-oriented approach is a good match for the needs and challenges of EU Cohesion Policy The policy brief discusses how a challenge-oriented approach to place-based innovation policies can bring added value to EU Cohesion Policy. In so doi…

Can EU regional policy benefit from adopting a challenge oriented approach? How this approach could help address some of the main longstanding challenges facing the policy?

My article with Dimitrios Pontikakis and Michal Miedzinski

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www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

What will be the place of Cohesion in the next Multiannual Financial Framework? Our annual #EoRPA review of Cohesion Policy has just been published, charting its implementation (also RRF), debates on MFF reform, the challenges, and the future policy approach to Cohesion.
👉https://bit.ly/3OykkHz

Some things never change.

“In economics, it is often professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth.”

Galbraith, 1958.

New (short) paper in Science and Public Policy discussing the role of politics in mission-oriented and transformative innovation policies. A topic so far relatively understudied which points to major challenges for the future uptake of these policies: academic.oup.com/spp/advance-...

Meanwhile on X…

(very spot-on comment by commissioner Ferreira 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻)

Here we are at the plenary of the Committee of the Regions where a landmark opinion on the 9th cohesion report/future or cohesion policy, to which I contributed as technical expert alongside Prof. Calin Hintea, is about to be approved. Congratulations to the rapporteurs Vasco Cordeiro and Emil Boc.

Thanks Tom. Table 1 (page 11) of the paper shows the av. proportion of ERDF + FP8 grants (together) in relation to overall private and public AI investments across Member States. We could estimate this share only at country level using the AI watch (ai-watch.ec.europa.eu/publications...)

Thanks Tom. Table 1 (page 11) of the paper shows the av. proportion of ERDF + FP8 grants (together) in relation to overall private/public AI investments by Member State. We could estimate this share only at country level using data from the AI watch (ai-watch.ec.europa.eu/publications...)

Public investment in AI development and adoption: spatial patterns, driving factors, future challenges (and the risk of more regional disparities).

Read our paper here: www.gee.gov.pt/pt/estudos-e...

We organise an exciting special session on the future of cohesion policy evaluation at the next @regstud.bsky.social annual conference. Please consider submitting your work

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www.regionalstudies.org/news/2025-rs...!

🌟Thinking about #RSA25 taking place at University of Porto, Portugal 🌟

⏰6-9 May 2025
➡️Navigating Regional Transformation

⏳Deadlines:

Special Session Proposals: 28 November 2024
Early Career Plenary Speaker: 10 December 2024
Abstracts & Bursary: 19 December 2024

💻 bit.ly/RSAAC25

🔁😊🍷

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My article on EU cohesion policy for a forthcoming encyclopedia (preprint on "Research Gate") www.researchgate.net/publication/...

A thought on the geography of US elections: Biden’s presided over the greatest wave of place-based policies in generations. Yet this has not yielded any particular gains for the Democrats in low income/long term declining counties. GOP has actually increased its lead in rural areas (see FT’s chart).

How has the readiness indicator been constructed? 👇👇👇

How ready are EU regions to tackle climate change? A map covering a selected number of countries.

Source: publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/b...

State Aid in the EU by policy objective: regional aid as well as state aid for R&D and climate/environmental protection on the rise (even prior to the adoption of more flexible state aid rules for green investments in 2022)

Source: academic.oup.com/jcle/advance...

Not counting the further increase in 2022-2023