EUROPEISKA REGIONALA UTVECKLINGSFONDEN I SVERIGEOCH FINLAND -En jämförande studie om beslutsprocesser

This study is about the decision-making processes in Sweden and Finland related to European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which is a part of the European Union cohesion policy. We have studied how two variants of decision-making processes differ in terms of efficiency and outcome. The two variants of decision-making we have analyzed is the swedish process with politicians as decision makers, and the finnish process with public officials as decision makers. In our study we have used three indicators set by the European Commission to measure how well Sweden and Finland meet their target for the operating program of 2006-2013. The indicators used are as follows: new jobs, numbers of start-ups supported and number of research and technological development". To measure these indicators we have used data from the European Commission. Our main conclusion is that there is a difference in outcome and efficiency depending on the decision-making process. In this project, where Sweden and Finland was compared to each other, Sweden with the more democratic legitimized process showed better outcome compared to Finland with the technocratic process