You're listening to the European Parliamentary Research Service podcast on the EU's Cohesion Fund.

It is one of the five European structural and investment funds and has played a key role in supporting less developed member states, move towards

environmental sustainability and moderniser transport and energy infrastructures.

Want to know which fund we're talking about? Stay with us for a few more minutes.

Accounting for over one third of the union's budget, cohesion policy, is the EU's main investment tool to help member states achieve economic, social and territorial cohesion.

This form of internal solidarity is administered through a myriad of funds, notably the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund and the Cohesion Fund.

Along with the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development and the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund,

they constitute the European Structural and Investment Funds,

with a budget of €454 billion for the period 2014 to 2020.

The Cohesion Fund amounts to 14% of this figure to support large-scale investments to modernise environmental and transport infrastructure. The fund was set up in the early 90s when the need was felt to develop a sort of solidarity mechanism

to ensure that the least developed member states were also able

to benefit from the removal of barriers to market competition and to develop their basic

infrastructure, while at the same time trying to meet the tight criteria on public debt and

deficits of the economic and monetary union. So who could apply? Only member states whose gross

national income per capita was below 90% of the EU average and having in place a programme for the achievement of economic convergence could get cohesion fund money and this continues to be the rule. So the first group of countries included Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. Since then, Ireland and Spain dropped out of the list,

but another 13 countries have joined, bringing the total number of beneficiaries to 15.

In absolute terms, the lion's share of the fund now goes to Poland and Romania,

but Estonia and Slovakia get the most money per inhabitant. But how much money are we talking about?

Well, quite a lot.

Close to €75 billion for the 2014-2020 period for the 15 beneficiaries.

Although over £11 billion must be transferred to the new Connecting Europe facility

to support the development of interconnected trans-European networks

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