DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17765358
title: EU FAR - EU Funds by Area Results - European Social Fund (ESF) Funds absorbed by Romanian Municipalities 2019-2023

description: The cumulative European Social Fund (ESF) funds for the period of 2019-2023 represent financial data received from the Ministry of Public Finance, following a public information request submitted by the Research Institute for Quality of Life (payments under budgetary code 58.02 – European Social Fund).  The database received from the Ministry of Public Finance included fiscal codes as unique identifiers for each municipality and provided information in national currency. The data management process included merging all the information for all the localities in Romania by assigning correct unique identification codes (LAU codes)[1] for all municipalities, for all the examined years. This exercise is based on a correspondence table between the fiscal and LAU codes provided by the Ministry of Development, Public Works and Administration. Notably, all the information in the database presents payments (executed budget) and not allocations.

Furthermore, the process of data management for converting the sums in comparable data converted the sums for each year in euro, based on the Euro/ECU exchange rates - annual data.[2] Afterwards, the sums in euro have been converted in euro at constant 2010 prices, based on the price index, implicit deflator.[3]

The next step included computing the constant euro per inhabitant for each year. The population information comes from the National Institute of Statistics, Population Census of 2021.

For comparative purposes, the variable on total sum of EU funds, expressed as euro, in constant prices per inhabitant for the entire timeframe, is indicated to be used.

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[1] From 2017 only LAU (see https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/nuts/local-administrative-units).




[2] Eurostat indicator [ERT_BIL_EUR_A]. This means that each sum in lei has been divided to the annual value corresponding to Romanian leu from the corresponding Eurostat indicator – average value, information extracted from Eurostat database on January 4, 2025. 




[3] Eurostat indicator [NAMA_10_GDP], Price index (implicit deflator), 2010=100, euro, for updating the database for 2023 data has been extracted on December 19, 2024. Data for computing first version of the EU FAR database has been extracted on September 29th, 2022 and the values used for computing the sums correspond to the dates of extraction.  This means that each sum converted in euro has been multiplied with 100 and then divided to the annual value from the corresponding Eurostat indicator. Updates have been performed for the budgetary year of 2020 based on this latest value of the deflator, as explained below. For the same year, data on the population of the districts of Bucharest has been processed from the Regional Statistical Directorate of Bucharest - https://bucuresti.insse.ro/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/POPULATIA-DUPA-DOMICILIU-LA-1-IANUARIE_2020.pdf.