Analysis of role of the EU outermost regions within their country and within their development funding from EU Structural funds

The aim of the thesis is to identify basic characteristics related to position of the outermost regions of the member states of the EU within EU development policies. These regions are evaluated from the point of view including allocated funding within Structural Funds (SF) and European Structural and Investments Funds during the programming periods of 2000-2006, 2007-2013, and 2014-2020, content of the operational programmes, and basic economic indicators. The outermost regions shows lower values of GDP per capita than European regions of the same country while showing higher allocated funding per capita than the European regions of the same country. The outermost regions also shows constantly growing GDP per capita at least from 2000 while the SF and ESIF allocated funding for the regions decreases. These findings are predictable. Interesting finding is that while the regional GDP of the outermost regions increases investments efforts do not shift towards soft projects. The investments efforts show steadily hard project implementation activities and increasing ratio of environmental projects, which are mostly hard projects. This finding creates space for improving concept of more developed regions focusing of soft projects and less developed regions focusing on hard projects