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The paper argues that the European Union Cohesion Policy 2014–2020 is re-oriented, away from the traditional goal of promoting balanced socio-economic development, towards a regional growth-policy perspective that puts the issue of competitiveness as a prerequisite for regional convergence. Through the analysis of two sets of reforms of the new Cohesion Policy, namely the place-based approach and the conditionalities, thematic priorities and the performance reserve, we show that the new Cohesion Policy provides a novel policy context that is likely to exacerbate the already existing disparities in economic performance amongst the European Union territories and augment existing uneven spatial relations.
Avdikos et al. (Mon,) studied this question.