Cohesion or confusion: a policy searching for objectives
Citations
112 citations
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Cites background from "Cohesion or confusion: a policy sea..."
...From its inception there has been much concern that the policy objectives pursued as part of the Lisbon strategy would compromise the cohesion objective of the European Union (Sharp 1998; Hoekman et al. 2009; Begg 2010)....
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82 citations
Cites background from "Cohesion or confusion: a policy sea..."
...However, throughout the 1990s and 2000s the policy and its principles have been threatened by a neoliberal agenda, shifting EU priorities, policy failings and national assertiveness (Allen 2005; Begg 2010; Hooghe 1998; Hooghe and Marks 2001)....
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...…goals have trumped the social and territorial dimensions owing to the Lisbon agenda’s emphasis on global competitiveness, encouraging a ‘misconceived’ and ‘overly narrow’ focus on innovation (Begg 2010: 92) and diverting support from traditional enterprise sectors (Bradley and Untiedt 2012)....
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...More fundamentally, the Lisbonization of cohesion policy has led to charges of goal congestion and confusion (Begg 2010)....
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...The scholarly literature predicted a gradual erosion of the policy’s foundational principles owing to an increasingly dominant neoliberal agenda, budgetary pressures, shifting EU priorities, policy failings and national assertiveness (Allen 2005; Begg 2010; Hooghe 1998; Hooghe and Marks 2001)....
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...These tensions are not new (Begg 2010), but have been exacerbated by the increasing dominance of a master narrative on Europe 2020, reinforced economic governance and the realpolitik of the Budgetary Review in the context of the crisis....
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68 citations
Cites background from "Cohesion or confusion: a policy sea..."
...…the popularization of the concept of multi-level governance (Marks, 1993), while the most recent 2006 reform illustrates the policy’s dextrous adaptability to the governance challenges of enlargement and especially the EU’s Lisbon agenda (Bachtler & Mendez, 2007a; Baun & Marek, 2009; Begg, 2010a)....
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...From a governance perspective, political-economy theories are equally unclear on the optimal assignment of policy competences between the EU and Member State levels (Begg, 2010b)....
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References
1,290 citations
"Cohesion or confusion: a policy sea..." refers background in this paper
...The core of the debate is whether there is a three-way division of policy making between the EU, national and subnational authorities (Marks, Hooghe, and Blank 1996) or whether the key decision-making power resides largely with the member states (Bache 2007)....
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1,097 citations
"Cohesion or confusion: a policy sea..." refers background in this paper
...…controversial since it invites a dependency culture in the less-favoured areas, implies the possible wasting of assets in such regions, and can also result in spatial imbalances that have damaging macro-economic consequences, as pointed out by Kaldor (1970) in making the case for regional policy....
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850 citations
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"Cohesion or confusion: a policy sea..." refers background in this paper
...For example, there is a conflict between the reasoning of the Barca (2009) report (which suggests that all regions should be eligible, even if the intensity of support varies) and the ECORYS (2008) report (which argues on subsidiarity grounds that future cohesion policy should be limited to member…...
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...A possible solution advocated by Barca (2009) is for cohesion policy to concentrate on a limited number of visible and politically agreed objectives within a broad remit of advancing economic and social cohesion....
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...Barca (2009) argues forcefully against repatriation on the grounds that this would entrench a side-payment logic and would contradict the economic development logic that he maintains should be at the heart of cohesion policy....
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...One prominent strand of thinking is that regional disparities in economic performance stem from market failures that create traps (Barca 2009) from which competitively weaker regions are unable to escape without external intervention in the form of economic development subsidies....
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...The way it has evolved has partly reflected significant episodes in European integration, such as the single market, agreement on EMU and the recent EU-10+2 enlargement (Barry and Begg 2003; Barca 2009)....
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