Impact Evaluation of EU Structural Funds on selected macroeconomic regional indicators in Banska Bystrica region

EU regional policy is implemented through instruments, which include EU budget funds allocated through the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund. The objective of the submitted contribution is to evaluate the state and the process of implementation of resources from the EU Structural Funds in the programming period 2007 - 2013 (2015 / n + 2 rule) on the territory of the BBK as a NUTS 3 region and quantify the impact of the use of structural funds on regional development in the region through selected indicators. The authors' team seeks to identify and quantify the positive/negative impact of the use of European Union structural funds on regional development in BBK as well as the question of the extent to which the use of European funds in the BBK has influenced the positive change in the regional development of the surveyed territory in the already ended programming period 2007-2013 (2015) in terms of selected regional macroeconomic indicators. Our research has produced relatively ambiguous and contradictory results. On the one hand, we managed to demonstrate, in the case of regional GDP a certain, statistically significant, but very low positive relationship between the development of this indicator and the level of SF and CF utilization. However, we have come to the conclusion that European SF and KF have not affect the total employment or disposable household incomes. The regression and correlation analysis has shown, that the above-mentioned regional characteristics are more significant affected by other, random, unexamined impacts and not on european regional policy.