Historical Retrospective of the Formation of European Regional Development Policy

The article notes that in EU countries, regional development, especially policies and regulations of regional development, has been constantly evolving and adapting to meet the needs of structural changes in countries, EU policies and the requirements of the regions themselves. However, the experience of forming and implementing regional policy in different countries had some differences. There is a significant amount of work devoted to the study of this experience, highlighting certain historical periods of its formation. Nevertheless, in the vast majority of scientific research the periodization is based on either economic factors (policy transformation associated with changing goals, economic and financial mechanisms of its implementation), or political and legal factors (transformation of principles, ideologies of regional policy, creating a legal basis for it implementation). There is a need to generalize these approaches to provide stages in the evolution of regional development policy in European countries. The aim of the article is to study the historical stages of the formation of regional development policy in European countries, to propose a generalized periodization of the evolution of policy. Having analyzed the economic, legal and institutional principles of formation and development of European regional development policy, the author provides the main stages of policy development. It is noted that the expansion of competencies of institutional structures formed the basis for the formation and development of a common EU regional policy, there are seven stages in the evolution of EU regional policy instruments, the institutional form of which later became the EU Framework Programs. The periodization of regional policy formation on the basis of the adoption of basic EU regulations is proposed. Based on the generalization of these approaches, the evolution of EU regional policy is given. The conclusion on actualization of necessity of use of experience of formation and realization of regional policy of EU in domestic practice is made.