Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-24-Speech-3-082"
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"en.20011024.4.3-082"2
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".
The debate on territorial units for statistics (NUTS) is not a technical debate about statistics because regional statistics and the classification of regions on the basis of NUTS provide a constant line of reference for analysing social and economic developments in the regions and determining which areas are eligible for structural support.
One of the most serious problems is that completely different political and economic units are used as a basis for collating and processing statistics. This is no accident and arouses even greater suspicion in conjunction with the fact, as the report quite rightly points out, that the Commission exercises ‘a great deal of flexibility’ when applying the criteria for classifying an area in NUTS Ι, ΙΙ, or ΙΙΙ, using them as it pleases, depending on the ‘needs’ of the case.
For example, a NUTS III type administrative division is used to allocate funds to Objective 2, thereby subsidising half the population of the Union and drastically reducing the funds available for the less developed areas for which they are supposedly intended. Between 1994 and 1999 (Delors II package) 51% of the population of the ΕU received support, of which only 25% corresponded to Objective 1, which funds NUTS II type regions. Lastly, of this 25%, only 16.4% related to Objective 2. In other words, because a small administrative division was used (NUTS ΙΙΙ), the rich countries received considerable support, thereby blatantly distorting regional policy in practice. Finally, it is again the rich countries which benefit, gobbling up a large slice of what are already miserly and insufficient appropriations from the Structural Funds.
Some countries benefit even more because the NUTS III type administrative divisions are very small compared with other countries. For example, this sort of administrative division (prefecture) has a surface area of 2,950 square metres in Greece, 3,162 square metres in Portugal and a mere 758 square metres in Germany.
All this illustrates, yet again, the malfunctions, inequalities, irregularities and hypocrisy of ΕU regional policy, in that a large chunk of the appropriations distributed in structural aid is ‘recycled’ and finds its way back to the more developed Member States, thereby seriously curtailing the potential for any national development policy, which is forced to remain within the confines of the poorly tailored Community ‘straitjacket’. As a result, not only do we fail to achieve the much-vaunted objective of convergence between the poorest and richest regions but, as the figures confirm – and Greece is a prime example – there is increasing divergence, not just between Member States in the north and the south, but between regions within Member States themselves. The only thing achieved with any degree of satisfaction is that people have been paid to turn a blind eye and mechanisms have been created to promote the interests of the large monopolies, which have benefited most from Community programmes.
Despite the fact that the rapporteur's report fails to ‘bring matters to a head’, it does at least touch on several serious problems and we shall support it."@en1
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