Evaluation of EU Regional Policy Using Satellite Data

To investigate local growth effects of EU regional policy, a microdata set on the receipt of EU funding at project level was combined with remote sensing data from various satellites for a selected pilot region in the border area between Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. This captures the growth of the regional economy via changes in the intensity of annual nighttime light emissions. At the community level, it can be shown that the receipt of higher amounts of funding is associated with higher growth.