€352bn earmarked for the 2014-2020 period in order to stimulate growth make cohesion policy the veritable pillar of European integration. However, decades of growth policies were not able to smooth out economic and social imbalances: Italy now unenviably tops the EU-15 chart of countries with the lowest social development index and Southern Italy is the largest depressed region in Europe. What went wrong?

For Italy, an inverse-U shaped relationship is found with the maximum of the effectiveness around 70% and no effects below and above 50% and 80%, respectively. This approach is quite informative as allows the policy makers to tailor the policy according to the specific value of the ratio.