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An Ever-Healthier Union? EU Funds as a Means of Expanding the Health Union
Sun, September 3, 8:00 to 9:30am PDT (8:00 to 9:30am PDT), LACC, 301BAbstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the EU unexpectedly hard. While there are large differences in excess mortality between Member States, it is the large variance within Member States that is most surprising (EC, 2022; Eurostat, 2022). These sub-national disparities are particularly relevant as excess mortality was often higher in rural areas than in urban centers, underlining pre-existing regional inequalities (see Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). Based on these findings and in view of the European Commission's stated goal of building a European Health Union, the study answers the following questions: How can regional differences in excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic be explained and how can health disparities be overcome within the framework of EU governance? In answering these questions, two theses are derived and tested. (1) A decisive factor in explaining the subnational variance in excess mortality is the differences in regional medical infrastructure. (2) European Structural and Investment Funds (ESI Funds) are in principle a suitable instrument to support the improvement of regional medical infrastructure. Previous contributions have already demonstrated that structural funds can successfully foster access to healthcare (see Neagu et al., 2017), in specific regions (see McCarthy, 2013) or individual countries (see Murauskiene and Karanikolos, 2017). Building on this, my study addresses the research gap between regional inequalities in health care illustrated by the pandemic and the determinants and overcoming of these inequalities. In the empirical part of the study, I use the allocation of funds in the funding period 2014-2020 in a quasi-experimental quantitative research design to enable a causal identification of the impact of ESI funds with a regression discontinuity design (RDD) as well as a difference in differences approach (DiD).