Analysing papers that reveal by decomposing territorial inequalities in the EU that the share of disparities attributed to the NUTS 3 level has increased over the last 20 years, this paper aims to examine to what extent the financial support in 2000-2006 from ERDF and CF, which are the main regional policy tools but mainly are directed to address the issues arising at the NUTS 2 level, contributed to supporting convergence at the NUTS 3 level. Our re-search strategy relies on combining a conditional β-convergence model and a difference-in-differences (DiD) estimator. Estimations are generated for four alternative post-policy periods, two ways to measure policy intervention and for different funds as well as different expenditure categories. Our research results bring to light the question of potential negative outcomes of the EU's existing regional policy since the policy that is focused on the NUTS 2 level is enlarging imbalances within these regions, i.e., among NUTS 3 regions.

中文翻译：

---

ERDF和CF的财政支持是否有助于欧盟趋同？NUTS 3级的经验证据

分析论文，通过分解欧盟的地区不平等现象，揭示出由于NUTS 3级差异而导致的差距在过去20年中有所增加，该论文旨在研究ERDF和CF在2000-2006年的财政支持程度，它们是主要的区域政策工具，但主要用于解决NUTS 2级别上出现的问题，有助于支持NUTS 3级别上的融合。我们的研究策略依赖于结合条件β收敛模型和差异差（DiD）估计量。针对四个备选的后政策时期，两种评估政策干预的方式以及不同的资金和不同的支出类别，产生估算。我们的研究结果揭示了欧盟的潜在负面结果问题