A Better Framework for Evaluating Cohesion Policies

The EU cohesion policy lacks clearly defined objectives and uniform standards for the evaluation of programs. This is because the evaluations are commissioned by national or regional administrative authorities, which have an interest in proving the success of their programs. This reduces the credibility of the performance reviews. These are the findings of a team of researchers from the ifo Institute and ZEW Mannheim based on data from the Cohesion Open Data Platform. It contains more than 2,500 evaluations of the member states.