Territorial allocation of EU Cohesion Policy investment in household waste-management infrastructure

This paper analyses the regional allocation of Cohesion Policy investment in household waste-management infrastructure across 207 NUTS 2 regions in 22 EU Member States during the 2014-2020 programming period. Although previous research has mainly examined waste-management outcomes and, in some cases, the effects of public support, much less is known about how infrastructure investment itself is distributed across territories. An original regional database is constructed from Kohesio project-location information and combined with baseline indicators of landfill dependence, municipal waste generation per capita, institutional quality, GDP per capita, population density and tourism intensity. The empirical strategy distinguishes between the extensive margin, defined as the probability that a region receives investment, and the intensive margin, defined as per capita investment intensity among recipient regions. It also separates investment in sorting-recycling measures from investment in treatment-disposal measures. The results show that investment receipt was more common in regions with lower GDP per capita and lower institutional quality, a pattern partly linked to the territorial structure of Cohesion Policy and cross-country programme take-up. Investment intensity, however, was more closely related to baseline waste-management conditions. Among recipient regions, higher total and sorting-recycling investment intensity was associated with stronger landfill dependence, while treatment-disposal investment intensity was more closely associated with municipal waste generation per capita. The allocation of waste-management investment is therefore better understood by considering not only whether support reaches a region, but also its intensity and the type of infrastructure financed.