The conference is the European Commission’s flagship event on the evaluation of cohesion policy and brings together senior policymakers, representatives of EU institutions, international organisations, national administrations, and academic experts. Professor Spruk participated as a speaker in the session on counterfactual analysis in cohesion policy, where he discussed the use of modern causal evaluation methods such as synthetic control to assess the economic and labour-market impacts of EU regional policy across different types of regions.

The invitation follows Professor Spruk’s recent work as lead author of a counterfactual impact evaluation of EU Cohesion Policy by the European Commission. His contribution focused on the opportunities and limitations of advanced evaluation methods for informing evidence-based regional policy design.