The spatial dimension of Public Payments for Rural Development: Evidence on allocation practices,impact mechanisms,CMEF indicators,and scope for improvement

EU expenditures for Rural Development, having increased from 2.9% of the total Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) budget in the 1990s to 12.3% in the beginning of the 2010s, reflect the growing strategic and societal values attached to this policy in addressing the new global challenges for rural areas in the enlarged EU. The analysis of the recent and ongoing reforms shows that Rural Development Programmes (RDP) made substantial progress towards sectoral integration and thematic broadening, and, at the same time, provided continuity of well-established and important measures. Yet, under growing budget constraints, better targeting of funds becomes even more crucial (European Court of Auditors, 2011). Comparing the design and allocation practices of Regional RDPs, however, reveals significant differences in targeting strategies, all too often based on the implementation history and experience of previous periods. Better availability, coordination and digital connectivity of expenditure data and other data sources across the EU encouraged the adoption of the Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (CMEF), aimed at more clearly depicting intervention needs and effects at the regional scale (NUTS2–NUTS3) (NUTS (Nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques) is a EU geocode standard for referencing spatial subunits for statistical purposes). The EU project SPARD (Spatial Analysis of Rural Development Measures) took those data as a starting point to find out more about the causal relationships between RD measure implementation, and their determining factors and impacts with a specific look at their spatial dimension: in which rural development measures is success determined by neighbourhood conditions, and at what scale? SPARD developed and applied new methodological approaches, particularly spatial econometrics, to evaluate selected measures that contribute to improved competitiveness, environmental performance and rural viability. The results are presented in this special issue in four thematic foci:

• •Analysing RDP performance by applying spatial econometric modelling (theory, procedures, key results) on RDP payments at the national and European scale.
• •Effectiveness and efficiency of RDP participation towards impacts at the regional scale: an in-depth view of European case studies, specific measures, indicators and shortcomings of the CMEF.
• •Learning about spatial and non-spatial determinants of participation in RDP.
• •Experiences and requirements related to the CAP 2020 and the improvement of the CMEF.

Overall, the results emphasise the difficulty of evaluating of RDPs, even when using much more sophisticated instruments than those used in the current evaluation practices. While a lack of appropriate information remains an issue, the experience of SPARD also underscores the challenge of matching the quest for generalised approaches and the need to consider ad hoc local determinants, as well as the trade-off between the benefits of higher precision and the costs of implied information burden.