The ‘SPARD’ project focuses on the Rural Development Programmes 2007-2013 and the structure and content of the corresponding Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (CMEF). As a result, the project’s contributions to monitoring and evaluation are related only to evaluation methods. The project examines how the spatial econometric methodology can evaluate RDP impacts on productivity growth, economic growth, and environmental protection.
SPARD developed tools to analyse to what extent EU rural development measures had the intended impact on:
- the economy through ‘productivity growth’,
- economic growth and tourism through ‘nights spent’ in tourist collective accommodation establishments,
- environmental targets through ‘nitrogen surplus'.
The project shows how to account for the spatial dependence in the data and advances with relevant econometric estimations for the different assessments. Results illustrate that in agricultural labour productivity and nitrogen surplus, spatial dependency is strongly present in the dependent variables (the result indicator) and modestly present in tourism.
The tools included Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) and spatial econometrics. A wide range of indicators, such as farm size and gross value added (GVA) in the primary sector, life-long learning, or unemployment were examined with ESDA methods. For all variables, there was an amount of spatial autocorrelation. Even if autocorrelation was low, some individual regions stood out as positive or negative clusters. Spatial econometric results showed that RDP spending positively affected labour productivity. The effect was more substantial in southern rural and urban areas and northern intermediate regions. When environmental indicators are assessed frequently, there are omitted variable issues due to missing or non-existing data such as soil types, local weather conditions or micro-climate, etc. These omitted variables are spatially correlated and their effect on the environmental impact indicators can be captured by spatial econometrics, as shown in SPARD’s methodological contribution.
