This concluding chapter provides a brief summary of the overall argument of the book, as well as an initial discussion of how it can be applied more broadly to improve inclusive growth and the EU's legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. The book closes by sketching areas for future research on the causes and consequences of well-being in the EU.

Summary of argument

This book argues that EU regional development should be conceptualized in terms of regional well-being, which emphasizes the distribution of wealth within regions. Regional well-being refers to a condition of distributive justice in a region, whereby poor and otherwise vulnerable people are provided with the capabilities needed to achieve the good quality of life they are striving for.

A firmer grasp of the ability of the EU to use its funds to improve regional well-being in its member states could help to remove the current barriers to achieving lasting well-being effects. Especially since the early 2000s, the EU's social goals have been increasingly mainstreamed into its legal framework governing regional development funding, and lifelong social investments in human capital have comprised about one fifth of the total structural and investment budget (Chapter Two). EU social investment co-finances domestic investment in education, healthcare and human capital, such as the renovation of university buildings and educational infrastructure, the provision of technical equipment, the building of medical centres and hospitals and support for vocational training projects or projects that integrate migrants into the labour market.

The ambition of this book is to better understand the effects of these EU social investments on regional well-being. The analysis has covered regional well-being in 16 of the 27 EU member states, with a combined population of 424 million in the period 1994–2013.

In terms of how well-being has developed in the EU regions examined, the data clearly show that life is better in rich regions where labour markets tend to work better, young people have better prospects, public health is stronger and people are on average more highly skilled and have more social trust. That said, Europe has faced a poverty and economic inequality standstill in both rich and poor regions since the 1990s.