| The European regional policy aims at promoting the economic growth of relatively less developed regions inside the European Union,as well as decreasing the economic gap among member countries.Through setting several policy funds and allocating money to recipients,European regional policy invests in some fields that are crucial to the economy of lagging regions,so as to support their development.It was believed to be effective on facilitating European integration for a long time.However,after the EU's eastward enlargement,thirteen countries became new members,and their levels of economic development were obviously lower than the EU 15's average level.Therefore,the economic disparity inside the EU reached its highest level of all time,which not only affects the development of the European economy,but also makes the efficacy of European regional policy uncertain.Under the new conditions,scholars conducted a large amount of research to analyze whether the European regional policy is still effective after the eastward enlargement.However,since the eastward enlargement happened not long before,there was no available data to conduct quantitative research.Thus,most of these studies were qualitative studies or policy studies.Recently,the European Commission published data about the absorbed amount of regional policy funds in the past years,which made quantitative research possible.This thesis adopts the latest data and chooses all the countries that joined the EU after its eastward enlargement as object of study,so as to analyze regional policy's effect on promoting the economic growth of these new member countries.At the same time,because China is also faced with a huge economic gap among the provinces,this thesis also discusses the referential lessons that the European regional policy can provide for China on the basis of the result of the study about European regional policy's effectiveness.First,this thesis discussed the rationality of adopting regional policy by summarizing some economic theories and the historical evolvement of European integration.When a huge economic gap and a common market exist at the same time,the productive factors in relatively less developed regions will tend to move to relatively advanced regions.As a result,it is almost impossible to eliminate economic gap automatically.Meanwhile,from the historical perspective,the enlargement of the EU was always accompanied by the expansion of economic gap among its member countries.Thus,adopting regional policy is also good for the whole union's economic development.Second,according to the specific characteristics of current regional policy tools and theories of economic development,this thesis developed a research model to conduct a multiple regression analysis with panel data.The results showed that during the observed time frame,European regional policy had significant effect on promoting new member countries' economic growth,but the degree of influence was a little lower than it was expected.Moreover,different policy funds had different degrees of influence.The ESF was more effective than the other two funds.Because the ESF invests to the fields that can develop human capital and reform the labour market,this result also to some extent revealed the mechanism for regional policy to take effect.Finally,the current regional development strategy in China still has room for improvement.Thus,this thesis combines the above results of the study about European regional policy with the problems of unbalanced regional economic development in the Chinese economy,and provides some concrete policy recommendations for China.For instance,Chinese policy-makers could consider designing some quantitative criteria,in order to better identify the beneficiary regions of regional policy.In addition,on the basis of European regional policy's experience,the Chinese government could consider devoting more efforts to develop human capital and reform the labour markets in lagging regions,so as to better promoting the economies of these regions. |
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