Impact of EU funds on the level of regional socio-economic development : the case of Poland

Purpose: The paper presents an investigation how the amount of EU funds invested in individual Polish regions contributed to a change in the socio-economic development level.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The study applied the zero unitarisation and five different methods of assigning weights to input variables. The TOPSIS method was applied to study the level of the socio-economic development in the regions, whereas the correlation between the amount of financial assistance received from the EU and the socio-economic development level was analysed by means of the Kendall rank correlation coefficient and p-value.

Findings: The results of the conducted research indicate that there was no relationship between the amount of subsidies received by individual regions and changing the position in the socio-economic development ranking in the years 2004-2018.

Practical Implications: The implementation of the proposed methodology of studying the impact of EU funds on regional socio-economic development could also be implemented in other EU member states, and that could serve as the basis for generating further conclusions, which will make it possible to focus EU resources on specific areas where they can bring desired outcomes.

Originality/Value: So far, we have not encountered any studies focused on analysing the relationship between the amounts of EU financial assistance and their impact on socio-economic development in such a broad perspective as we propose.