Analysis of the effectiveness in the disbursement of the European Regional Development Fund for selected entities in the tourism economy

The aim of the article is to analyse the effectiveness of decision-making in the disbursement of funds from the ERDF for the selected tourism services. In the theoretical part of the article, the model for the assessment of the effectiveness of the ERDF management system was developed. This model is built based on the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method, used to assess the effectiveness of community programmes. In the empirical part of the article, the verification of the model was carried out following the example of the tourism sector of the NUTS 2 region of Podlasie. The obtained results allow concluding that the developed deadweight assessment model can be used in practice for the evaluation of the efficiency of the ERDF management. The conducted research indicates that the method of Propensity Score Matching (PSM), using the Neyman-Rubin model based on counterfactual studies, allows assessing the decision-making effectiveness in the disbursement of funds from the ERDF. Creating counterfactual situations in the models of evaluation of infrastructural actions serves for the identification of the effect of an independent event. The effect of an independent event measures the negative, unintended consequences of the undertaken decisions. It informs about the loss of alternative possibilities of allocating funds for other purposes.