The allocation of Structural Funds, the most important component of the European Union (EU) cohesion policy, is subject to intense bargaining between national governments and across layers of political governance. Using Structural Funds data for each cohesion objective over 1989-99, we examine which variables, economic and political, determine the actual funds allocation. We test our hypotheses with a Tobit model that accounts for the two-stage allocation process and our limited dependent variables. Our results indicate that economic criteria are not the only determinants of funds allocation. Indeed, we find that the political situation within a country and a region and the relations between various layers of governance influence the allocation process. This article is also the only study to measure the impact of additional funds provided by the region or the country itself, and to differentiate the analysis by cohesion objective. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author(s). Journal compilation (c) 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Income inequality, European Union, European integration, EMU, Regional disparities,

In this paper we derive an alternative measure for structural unemployment using a stochastic frontier analysis. This measure, by empirical design, is always less than total unemployment and it is, thus, more consistent with the theoretical description of structural unemployment than its usual interpretation as a smoothed long-run average of total unemployment. We find that our measure does not always track the long-run trends in total unemployment in the U.S. and when compared to the existing measures can produce different insights about the evolution of structural unemployment. Demographic and regional evidence provides some validation for our approach and allows us to determine how demographic and regional factors are related to the variation in structural unemployment across time and regions.

In this paper, national and regional data on job vacancies and unemployment are combined to estimate the Beveridge curves of five European countries and 60 regions, focusing on the period 1975-2004. The Beveridge curve depicts the empirical negative relationship between job vacancy rate and unemployment rate, and reflects the efficiency of the job matching process. Movements along a fixed downward-sloping Beveridge curve are associated with cyclical shocks, while shifts of the curve arise from structural factors that alter the matching efficiency between job vacancies and unemployed workers. With the same data I then analyze shifts in the Beveridge curves and determine whether these shifts are due to structural changes affecting the matching efficiency, or to cyclical factors. The empirical evidence suggests that changes in labor market institutions, longterm unemployment, as well as cyclical shocks are responsible for outward shifts in European Beveridge curves.

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