Economic Growth and Cohesion Policy Implementation in Italy and Spain

This book concerns EU Cohesion Policy and the economic convergence of underdevelopedregions in Italy and Spain from the first programming period to the present: it investigates the politicaland institutional factors that determine the success or failure of implementing EU Cohesion Policy atnational and sub-national level, as well as their impact on economic growth. On the wave of theAmerican tradition of development studies, this book suggests that public policy analysis can befruitful for understanding economic growth and cohesion, if it were to reconstruct domestic public interventions for development and the institutional characteristics of the subjects responsible forpursuing development goals. To do so, this book derives its theoretical foundations from thetraditional debate on the role of state actors in promoting economic development and on the institutionalcharacteristics that the public authorities involved in the process ofeconomicdevelopment should display. More precisely, by adopting an Hirschmanian approach to development,it elaborates an original framework to compare different Cohesion Policy implementations and tounderstand its economic results in different countries, using Italy and Spain as pilot studies.