European Union Funds – Application Perspective

The result of an effective management of the redistribution of European Union funds should be a reduction of disparities between EU regions by guaranteeing their comprehensive and harmonious development and supporting the economic and social cohesion of member countries. A poorly-conducted programming process of financial interventionism, the source of which is EU funds, may result in divergence between regions, the direct effect of which would be their social and economic marginalisation. For this reason, it is important to skillfully manage those funds. The main aim of this article is to present the factors affecting the decision-making process of the use of EU co-financing, and that includes the pandemic as an external variable being a threat to the implementation of investments from the EU’s structural funds. To explain the multivariate associations between explanatory variables and the binary outcome variables, logistic regression was employed. Based on the tests’ results, significant associations were observed between the dependent variable and (a) participation in training co-financed by EU funds, (b) receiving information regarding additional EU funds as pandemic support, and (c) the suspension of planned investments using EU funds due to the pandemic situation. A comprehensive distribution of respondents according to the response categories in the analysed variables within the entire sample (N = 950) was presented. Corresponding associations were evident within a sub-sample (N = 303). The model showed that all significant independent variables explain the use of EU funds, but the model explains just 28.6% of the decision to use the funds. Thus, the following study indicates directions that require further research.