The government on Thursday passed the bill on the promotion of balanced regional development that envisages the country's division into two cohesion regions in order to facilitate the phasing of EU funds. The bill on the promotion of balanced regional development, which envisages the country's division into two cohesion regions, is to be passed in an emergency procedure in July. The decision was taken on Monday by the collegiate body of the parliament speaker.
According to the proposal, the country would be divided into the more developed northwest and the larger, less prosperous southeast, which encompasses the eastern and southeastern regions.
Slovenia is yet to start negotiating with the EU on division into two regions: it has so far been treated by the EU as one region, and it was not until March that it managed to convince the EU to start talks on the division to multiple regions.
The relevant EU directive sets the minimum criterion of 800,000 people per cohesion region. From this point of view, the proposal is an acceptable compromise between the mulled division to two or three regions, Zagar believes.
According to the minister, this solution is essential and necessary for negotiations on the EU's budget framework in the 2007-2013 period.
The bill states that both cohesion regions will have their development councils which will act as overseers in the implementation of EU programmes.
Meanwhile, there is to be only one management body for the EU programmes - the Office for Local Government and Regional Policy, joined by the Agency for Regional Development.
The bill furthermore determines the scope of regional aid, which is to increase from 1% to 1.5% of GDP in the next programming period.
Moreover, regional initiatives are explicitly defined as state funding for the co-financing of regional projects from the regional development programmes.
The proposal comes after PM Janez Jansa said that Slovenia would immediately launch negotiations with Brussels on the country's division into several statistical regions given the failed negotiations on the next financial period 2007-2013.
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