The effects of cross-border cooperation programs on Vojvodina’s regional development

Abstract

The cross-border EU programs becoming available in the early 2000s presented an opportunity to Vojvodina, a northern Serbian province with limited autonomy, to allocate development funds for its governmental and civilian sectors. The aim of my paper is to evaluate the impact of these funds on regional development, by analyzing development level changes of certain municipalities, the volume of allocated funds and their interrelations.

Vojvodina is bordering with three EU Member States (Croatia, Hungary and Romania), and Serbia has options for cross-border cooperation with all of them, financed by the European Union. The Croatian program is in its second budgetary period, while the two others are in their third cycles. In the article, as the starting point of the research, I outline the development levels in Vojvodina municipalities. Moreover, I show the background of these co-operations, their program features and their co-operation quality, and I also present them as projects impacting regional development. Based on statistical data, I compare their development level with respect to allocated funds in the 2010–2014 period. In the research I focused on only the ten most successful municipalities in implementing EU programs based on the data and analysis, and I argue, that the cross-border cooperation programs of the European Union had no positive impact on the regional development in Vojvodina. We can say that the development path of the bigger towns was broken in 2012, while the smaller ones experienced a slight increase. Accordingly, we cannot conclude that cross-border cooperation funds have caused considerable development; however, these EU funds present statistically relevant development alternatives to smaller settlements. In general, the EU funds did not affect the regional development of Vojvodina positively: territorial development stagnated, and the development level of certain territorial units did not exceed levels from the period before. In overall, the evaluation of the period between 2009 and 2014 has shown that the projects were not be able to offset the external, primarily political and economic impacts that determined the development path of the area.