4. How to measure the impact of public policies on human development?
and analysing the relationship between public intervention and development indicators errors may be too high to report anything conclusive. Nevertheless, in the current programming period, there are five reports presenting the value of contracts signed with the beneficiaries at the end of each year: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. The data presented is cumulative. The collected information on individual projects includes: the programme, contract number, project title, type of beneficiary, location and value of the project. The location of the project is the key information needed in this case, and some projects have identified several regions or counties – it seems thus important to have information about the percentage of the distribution amount for each unit of local government. Due to the different approaches to the way the data is aggregated in both frameworks, the reports for the period 2004–2006 duplicates the full value of the project in cases where projects that have been implemented in more than one municipality or more than one county/voivodeship. Therefore, it would be a mistake to sum them up, as it would lead to an overestimated total amount. Another approach was used in the current financial framework. For the reports on the value of projects implemented in the period 2007–2010, an algorithm was used, according to which the amounts are proportionally divided, if the area of the project covers more than one administrative unit. If a project had been, for example, implemented in three counties, information on the contract would appear three times, but in each of three records just part of the total amount of the contract would appear. In addition, there were projects of nationwide coverage that were not clearly classified when it comes to the financial resources allocated and their impact. In many cases, it is difficult to clearly determine and assign territorial scope of the project or its effects, especially when dealing with big scale investments in hard infrastructure, such as roads, sewer system, electroenergetic or telecommunication lines or systemic projects. Taking into account the above-described simplified system for the allocation of quotas among the administrative entities and the number of projects nationwide that are not taken into account in the analysis by territorial division, the data presented should be treated as estimates when it comes to their territorial scope. One can try using small-area estimates to determine the level of allocation of EU funds, but it also is not sufficiently reliable because of the differences in the patterns in which the individual project allocations; due to those differences assigning the expenditures to individual categories would be biased by the subjective judgment of the person assigning. The most reliable indicators of the use of funds from the Operational Programmes and the Regional Operational Programmes do not say anything about the relationship between cohesion policy and human development indicators at the local level. However, a more detailed analysis outlines a link between the Human Capital Operational Programme and human development, as well as the low correlation of resources which can be linked to LHDI by territorial factors. The question remains, however, whether a more significant correlation for the expenditure on peripheral areas could be observed, in terms of human development within the NSRF 2007–2013 (National Strategic Reference Framework 2007–2013), if it were possible to calculate the Local Human Development Index for 2004, 2005 and 2006. An overall assessment of the impact of cohesion policy on human development is difficult. From 2007–2010, we can observe a fluctuating but growing importance of EU money in the budgets of local authorities. This has a positive impact on improving the investment attractiveness of the local government entities, as well as on quality of life of the people. Big cities especially are taking action involving far more EU funds (see Smętkowski & Płoszaj 2011) and are more likely to use national
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