ABSTRACT

Empirical evidence of the relationship between administrative capacity and the use of EU funds is plentiful. According to this strand in literature, the complexity of spending rules is key in explaining the implementation gap. What would happen should administrative requirements be relaxed? This paper looks into the implementation of the European Fund for the Integration of third country nationals (EIF), a fund with simpler spending rules and yet a higher rate of unused money. Adapting the hypotheses put forth in absorption literature to the specifics of the EIF, I confront capacity-based explanations to (under-explored) preference-based ones in a comparative fashion. Even when spending EU money is easier, strong support is found for capacity explanans and little for preferences. Even so, administrative capacity appears to be only one factor amongst many, with financial capacity and decentralization playing strong roles too. Empirical evidence is drawn from the application of time-series cross-section methods to an original dataset.

摘要

行政能力与欧盟资金使用之间关系的经验证据很多。根据文献中的这一线索，支出规则的复杂性是解释实施差距的关键。如果放宽行政要求会怎样？本文研究了欧洲第三国国民融合基金 (EIF) 的实施情况，该基金的支出规则更简单，但未使用资金的比率更高。使吸收文献中提出的假设适应 EIF 的具体情况，我以比较的方式面对基于能力的解释与（未充分探索的）基于偏好的解释。即使花费欧盟的钱更容易，也为容量解释者找到了强有力的支持很少有偏好。即便如此，行政能力似乎只是众多因素之一，财政能力和权力下放也发挥着重要作用。经验证据来自将时间序列横截面方法应用于原始数据集。