The Outermost regions within EU territorial governance framework: Structural Funds and economic development

The increase of authority beyond and within the State has strongly strengthened the power of regions and prompted the rise of subnational tiers of government within the States (Hooghe et. al., 2010). The outermost regions - French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, Reunion Island and Saint-Martin (France); Azores and Madeira (Portugal), and the Canary Islands (Spain) - in the European Union represent a distinctive and special format of territorial governance framed by a multilevel structure. Likewise, the institutional diversity of each region and the terms in which they anchor the economic and regional development is dependent of the amount of the Structural Funds received. Given the variations in socio-economic conditions across EU regions, at the outermost regions – islandness and geographic remoteness – this constitutes important challenges to EU governing territorial governance. In this paper we develop our argument to answer How does the absorption and allocation capacity of the EU resources, namely through the Structural Funds, help on regional development and convergence within the EU regions? We consider the nine outermost regions in the context of the EU to study the variation and the differential impacts of Structural Funds (namely, ERDF) on regional authority and economic development. Using and interacting with novel data, we will bring through RHOMOLO dynamic general equilibrium model, the outcomes of the 2014-2020 policy implementation at the EU outermost regions.