REGI seeks more funds for territorial cooperation

According to the Europolitics on-line daily, the European Parliament’s Committee on Regional Development (REGI) is in favour of increasing the budget allocated for territorial cooperation (Objective 3 of the Cohesion Policy) to 7% in the future EU cohesion budget.

This would mean that the total amount of resources directed to the European Territorial Cooperation (ETC), currently at a level 2,5 % (around € 8.5 billion) of the total EU budget, would increase by around 280% to almost € 24 billion. The request to increase the allocation of funds for the ETC was presented in a report on the future of territorial cooperation in Europe, which was adopted by REGI on 22nd March 2011.

Also, the Committee would like to maintain the current division of the ETC into three main components – cross-border (cooperation between regions on opposite sides of a border), transnational (cooperation on a larger scale, between neighbouring regions based on the same geographical area) and inter-regional (cooperation independent of the geographical location of the regions). The Committee also supports the continuation of the financial preponderance of the cross-border component (currently around 73% of the ETC budget), and would like to see funds for the Objective 3 allocated by cooperation programmes, rather than by member states.

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