In December 2005, when the Member States agreed upon the budget for the 2007-2013 programming period, the threshold of 75% of the EU GDP (PPP) average at NUTS2 level was used when deciding the levels of financial support available within the context of the Structural Funds. However, all of the regions characterised as disadvantaged from the European point of view do not in fact share the same degree of ‘backwardness’ as some may be rather prosperous in the national or regional context. A territorially differentiated type of Regional policy would ensure that regions get a fairer distribution of financial support.

 

• Established at a more detailed territorial level than the one of regional policy (NUTS2/3 instead of NUTS2) and using GDP at current price (euros rather than PPP) this synthetic map shows that in almost all EU-27 countries there are regions defined as “lagging”. Indeed, the map does not focus only on regions located under the threshold of 75% of EU mean (global deviation) but take also into account the regions under 75% of the mean of the country they belong (national deviation) or 75% under the mean of neighbouring regions located at less than 4 hours by road (local deviation*).
• The regions that are under 75% for all three deviations (coloured in red), are generally located in new member states, especially near the border with non-EU countries such as Belarus, Russia or Ukraine. The whole of Estonia and Latvia, with the exception of their capital regions, belong to this category. There are also a few regions in the former EU-15 countries that belong to this category, and these can be found, in Southern Italy and in the South-Western parts of Greece.
• Even with an incomplete criterion like the threshold of 75% of GDP per capita, it is certainly possible to define a more targeted regional policy through the multiscalar evaluation of disparities in different territorial contexts.