ECR Vice-President Juraj Droba stressed the importance of providing the Member States with more flexibility to level discrepancies caused by statistics in allocating the EU Funds. The President of the Bratislava region expressed these views in a high-level debate on cohesion with Commissioner Elisa Ferreira and EIB Vice-President Lilyana Pavlova, held during the CoR plenary session of January 2022. 

Mr Droba reiterated that the case of Bratislava Region in Slovakia, a region that is facing serious structural challenges, proved that GDP level does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with the complex development needs of the territory. 

He explained that it was crucial that the EU law currently provided Member States with a certain degree of flexibility to level discrepancies caused by statistics, and he reiterated the necessity of going beyond GDP, which was not able to mirror very well what was happening on the ground: "I am really glad that, when deciding on EU funds allocations and cohesion policy implementation, the European Commission takes into consideration the complex development of the Bratislava region, not only its GDP level".

Responding to Mr Droba, Commission Elisa Ferreira acknowledged that it was true that GDP per capita did not give a whole picture of the situation of regions, and cohesion policy should mainly boost convergence: "In the case of Slovakia, it is important to keep the momentum for Bratislava and to solve the internal imbalances. I see important opportunities from a social and an economic perspective. We should take this period as a game changer to alleviate pressure on more developed cities."