East Central Europe's (ECE) recent record in accumulating FDI stock is notable even from a global perspective. While most scholarly works downplay the role of the European Union (EU) in this process, this article claims that in an attempt to manage the economic opportunities and threats that ECE posed after the regime change, the EU has actively shaped foreign capital inflows to the region. First, the EU triggered a liberal shift in ECE's FDI policies. Second, after enlargement, the EU has reinforced ECE's locational advantages through its practice of approving most of the incentive schemes offered to foreign investors. While investors mainly coming from the old EU Members began to dominate ECE economies, the region's heavy reliance on FDI has also produced a reverse effect: ECE investments have enhanced the global competitiveness of western European firms. To a certain extent, FDI has therefore transcended the traditional east–west divide.

The cohesion policy of the European Union has become its primary instrument promoting development in the peripheral member states. The enduring consequences of the 2007-08 crisis and the economic governance agenda requiring fiscal discipline from the member states have raised the policy's significance further. However, similar economic inequalities characterize the EU nowadays as several decades ago. The cohesion policy is by no means alone responsible for this, but the reasons for its ambiguous performance deserve further scrutiny. Empirical studies explain variation in fund performance with domestic institutional quality and absorption capacity, but the member states' fund spending strategies have not been addressed so far. This is puzzling because they are important determinants of the economic effects of EU funds. The paper fills this gap by investigating the spending strategies of the Southern and the Eastern members in two recent programming cycles (2007-13 and 2014-20). Assessed on five expenditure categories, the paper reveals that physical infrastructure investments enjoyed priority over long-term growthgenerating R&D and human capital projects and that the allocation of EU funds did not reflect domestic development needs.

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