Regional Size, Wealth and EU Regional Policy

Convergence objective seeks to promote growth within European Union (EU) for least-developed regions. The list of regions and areas eligible for Convergence are chosen from the NUTS-2 European regional classification. However, as it is well-known, spatial (and temporal) measures are scale dependent. The aim of this article is to show how sensitive Convergence selection criterion is to the level of geographic aggregation used, assessing the impact that the use of a different NUTS breakdown would have had on the distribution of the regional budget among countries.