The new EU Cohesion Policy is one of the largest integrated development policies in the West, and one of the largest of such programmes anywhere in the world. The reforms to the Policy contain many different elements each of which interlink in order to provide a cohesive overall framework. This volume provides important insights into some of the key elements of the EU Cohesion Policy covering some of the key challenges for the implementation of policy reforms in the coming years.

Philip McCann holds The University of Groningen Endowed Chair of Economic Geography in the Faculty of Spatial Sciences at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and is also the Tagliaferri Research Fellow in the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge 2015-2018. He is one of the world's most highly cited and widely published economic geographers and spatial economists of his generation.

Attila Varga is Professor and Director of the Regional Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Centre at the University of Pécs. He is an internationally well-known researcher of the field of regional innovation and economic development. He publishes widely and serves on the editorial boards of various international journals.

1. Introduction: The Reforms to the Regional and Urban Policy of the European Union: EU Cohesion Policy 2. Conditionalities and the Performance of European Structural Funds: A Principal-Agent Analysis of Control Mechanisms in European Union Cohesion Policy 3. Quality of Government and the Returns of Investment: Examining the Impact of Cohesion Expenditure in European Regions 4. Smart Specialization, Regional Growth and Applications to European Union Cohesion Policy 5. When Spatial Equilibrium Fails: Is Place-Based Policy Second Best? 6. The Potential Application of Qualitative Evaluation Methods in European Regional Development: Reflections on the Use of Performance Story Reporting in Australian Natural Resource Management 7. RHOMOLO: A Dynamic General Equilibrium Modelling Approach to the Evaluation of the European Union's R&D Policies