The Research On Structural Funds Absorption Capacity Of Central And Eastern Europe In EU Regional Policy

EU regional policy promotes the economic transition of its member states’ backwardcountries or areas through financial aid in order that their level of economic developmentcould catch up with the average level of EU’s economic development, which will makethem compete with other member states in the same scratch line to improve theconstruction of Europe’s internal market and strengthen the political cohesion inside theregion. Structural fund is one of the main policy instruments. Central&eastern Europehas made great progress in realizing economic growth and structural transformationthrough making use of the EU structural funds. However, the effects of structural fundshas not been exerted to its maximum efficiency.In this paper, we analyze the structural funds’ absorption capacity of central&eastern Europe countries and grade them into different classes on the basis of mass data.The study shows that these countries generally have a low absorption capacity ofstructural funds at the mercy of economic development level and the defect of SF’soperating mechanism. Afterwards based on magnanimous statistics and facts, we analyzethe influencing factors that have an impact on SF’s absorption capacity of central&eastern Europe countries. The researching shows that economic development level andtransition indicator are all positively related with SF’s absorption rate, which has greattheoretic and practical implications and will provide useful references for China ondealing with the problem of disparities in different areas.