NKFIH projet number: FK 135342
The primary objective of the research is to compare the implementation of the EU’s transnational industrial policy in the Southern and Eastern members of the EU. The project is embedded into a burgeoning academic and policy debate about the role of industrial policy in upgrading domestic economies in the 21st century. In the case of the lagging Eastern and Southern EU members, industrial policy gains special salience because the drivers of their current growth models have been exhausted. The project therefore seeks to explore the extent to which dependent market economies in the East and mixed market economies in the South are able to use the opportunities (state aid) and resources (EU funds) of the EU’s transnational industrial policy to promote enterprises that perform high value-added economic activities thereby upgrading their economies. The project is concerned with the analysis of three Southern (Italy, Portugal and Spain) countries and the Visegrad states (timeline: 2004-2019).
Research objectives:
(1) to explore and compare the evolution of the pre- and post-crisis institutional and economic structures for industrial policy in the East and the South;
(2) to identify the private sector recipients of state aid and EU Structural Funds and determine their value added in both peripheries;
(3) to determine the differences between the East and the South in targeting high value added businesses;
(4) to explore the relationship between spending on high value added activities and the value added of exports;
(5) to explore the determinants of distribution of support for high value added activities at the regional (NUTS 2) level.
Research period: 01/November/2020 – 31/October/2023
Principal investigator: Gergő Medve-Bálint
Contributing research fellows: