Rating Analysis of Cohesion Policy of the European Union and the Member Countries

The successful European Union (EU) and Member States Cohesion Policy requires an in deep analysis in which different approaches can be used. This study is focused only on the potential of the rating analysis. For this purpose firstly there is an attempt to create two basic ratings. These are the Cohesion rating of the economic and social situation of the EU countries and the investment rating for their investment expenses. For the construction of these ratings are used selected absolute and relative indicators. On this basis, the possibility of averaging of their values is treated. The ascending or descending ranking of the average indicators is made in order to rank the different countries of EU by each indicator. After that, the possibility of creating the two ratings is shown. This study shows the inverse dependency between the investment and the Cohesion ratings. It is assumed that inverse dependency is based on the fact that better economic and social conditions of a given country need less investments expenses for meeting Cohesion policy goals and vice versa. The degree of the dependency is also treated. It is assumed that it can be evaluated by the differences between the values of the two ratings. It is also concluded that measurement of the degree of dependency is possible to be made by the percentage representation of these differences. The conclusion of this study supports the view that the use of the Cohesion Policy rating analysis should be combined with the use of other statistical, mathematical and econometric methods and approaches.