Drivers and indicators of the EU rural development expenditure mix across space: Do neighbourhoods matter?

This paper analyses the 2007–2013 Rural Development Programmes’ expenditure mix within the EU-27 space.\r\nIts major novelty consists in using indicators and methods combining a high level of expenditure disaggregation\r\nacross both regions and measures to assess the drivers of the expenditure mix at a more local level. At the\r\nadopted scale of analysis, the rurality degree of any region, the rurality of the neighbours and their respective\r\nexpenditure patterns are explicitly considered. Results suggest that more rural regions spend more funds as\r\nexpected, but their expenditure mix, and the share of agro-environmental payments in particular, also depends\r\non the characteristics of the neighbouring space, thus confirming the presence of spatial dependence in spending\r\npatterns and the need of its explicit consideration in any ex-post expenditure assessment