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Well my experience as a person living in Eastern Europe is that EU funds are just very expensive roundabout subsidy for German car manufacturers - since everybody steals bulk of the money and buys expensive cars.

So injecting capital is almost guaranteed to not work.

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And yet in terms of economic development countries which joined EU are doing quite markedly better than those that didn't. Obviously, there's some selection bias -- only those who sort of had their shit together were allowed to join. And also just plain market access would have account for some of that. But still, as a person who grew up in EE in the 90s, I feel like people are very quick to forget how bad it really was, and how quickly -- within a generation -- things drastically improved, and how unusual that is.

Money isn't capital and this issue can be helped by giving not money but coupons that can only be used for construction.

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