Social Goals in EU Regional Development Policy

Chapter 2 sets the stage by describing the multi-stage and multi-level process of disbursing EU regional spending. The chapter analyses how and to what extent social goals have been integrated into EU regional policy historically, and in what context. It considers EU regional policy reform from a historical perspective, and specifically analyses EU regional funding programmes and the amounts of funding allocated to social goals over time. It finds that social goals have been increasingly mainstreamed into the EU’s regulatory framework for regional spending and to a lesser extent in regional funding practices. However, the EU’s social investment portfolio has remained largely unchanged since the late 1990s. Moreover, social investments have remained at about a fifth of the EU regional policy budget.