Spanish Regions Progress Stymies Bid for EU Bucks

Some say that Spain has become the victim of its own prosperity in the wake of rapid economic development since joining the European Union, with a number of regions passing the threshold for eligibility for development funding from Brussels. The good news is that economic progress is being made!

On the basis of gross domestic product per capita figures for 2002, released recently by the EU's statistics office, only Extremadura in the southwest and Andalusia in the south remained below the ceiling of 75 percent of the average GDP per capita in the 25-member bloc to qualify for so-called Objective 1 regional funding, which is aimed at bridging the gap between the bloc's richer and poorer areas. Read more here.