The response of regional well-being to place-based policy interventions

Enhancing the well-being of its citizens is the central remit of the EU's regional policy, but as yet, there is no analysis of the effects of EU regional policy on local well-being. The aim of this paper is to examine this relationship. To do this, we define a novel regionalised well-being measure and we exploit a dataset on regional expenditure in a continuous treatment framework. Based on both parametric and semi-parametric approaches, our analysis demonstrates that the EU regional development policy does influence regional well-being differently from GDP. We find evidence of a linear monotonic response of well-being growth to total transfers, although this effect varies according to the time lag considered and the level of development of the region.