Fighting Gravity: Institutional Changes and Regional Disparities in the EU

A thorough investigation of the relationship between the deepening and the widening processes of EU integration and the historic evolution of regional disparities is missing in the related vast existing inductive literature. This usually focuses on EU15 countries or Central and Eastern European Countries, generally involves relatively short and recent periods, and takes into consideration just one institutional change at a time, if any. This article aims at filling these gaps by providing a theoretical interpretative framework on the effects of each institutional change on inter- and intranational disparities, and by verifying the fitness of the theoretical expectations with a longitudinal trend analysis and with an econometric event analysis. Theory was overall right in claiming that widening and deepening of the EU would have exacerbated intraregional disparities. Counteracting such tendency could look like fighting gravity, since disparities continuously reappear in different forms and spatial levels, transmitting a sense of unescapable normality.