Politicians prefer to look forward rather than back: What matters is how to win the next election and control the future.

Sadly, that means few serving politicians will look at a report the European Commission has just published on its spending to boost economic and social development — known in EU jargon as Cohesion Policy — in 2007-2013. A shame, not least because the report has lots to tell them about the EU as it is now, and about how it may evolve.

It suggests that EU spending is growing in effectiveness but fading from view. And in some parts of Europe, EU spending is now of only peripheral importance.

The Treaty on the European Union declares that the EU “shall promote economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among member states,” which now reads somewhat ironically in view of the U.K.’s decision to leave. Nevertheless, Cohesion Policy accounts for a sizeable chunk of all EU spending: In the period 2007-2013, it was €346.5 billion, or about 35 percent of the total budget, to which was added another €105.3 billion leveraged from the member countries and €25.3 billion of private co-financing.

The Commission’s report covers two of the three funds for such spending, the European Regional Development Fund and the Cohesion Fund, but not the European Social Fund. Together the first two made up €270 billion of that EU contribution of €346.5 billion.

Commission spin doctors put out the report with the message that for every €1 spent from the EU, €2.74 will have been added to the bloc’s GDP by 2023. It estimated that the spending had created one million jobs.

But the report itself delivers a much less smug and self-satisfied message. It is the product of a serious attempt to ask what effect EU money has had. Small armies of consultants, researchers, auditors and economists were used to evaluate different elements of the ERDF and the Cohesion Fund (the latter is reserved for those countries whose GDP is below 90 percent of the average, which in this period was the 12 countries that joined the bloc in 2004 or later, plus Greece and Portugal, with some transitional aid to Spain).

The evaluation was divided up into 14 strands, some of them specific to an economic theme or objective (transport, environment, energy efficiency, etc.), some of them more general and overarching. But in essence they were grappling with questions that concern most public administrations large or small. Does what we are trying to do work? How could it be better?

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There is nothing specific to EU policy or EU money about such questions, even if the Eurocracy may add layers of complications about, for instance, eligibility criteria and accountability. The essential questions — How do we create jobs? How do we create economic growth? How do we look after the vulnerable and protect those parts of society that are in danger of falling behind? — those are common to most layers of local, regional and national government in mixed economy welfare states. Even Euroskeptics who would rather the EU was not redistributing public money would like to have the answers.

What the 2007-2013 evaluation offers is a piecemeal answer: lessons from particular policy areas about how public money was best used, which when put together might contribute to overall improvement. In transport, for instance, it argues that the EU should no longer be using Cohesion Policy to fund roadbuilding in pre-2004 member countries. When trying to boost the energy efficiency of buildings, loans are preferable to grants. With waste management, smaller public authorities struggle with environmental projects that are complex but infrequent: They need expertise and experience that they don’t have in-house.

The evaluation report comes with a health warning. The Commission admits that for many projects and programs in the 2007-2013 period, assessing success and failure was difficult because objectives, performance indicators and selection criteria were missing or inadequate. What we are told is that the concern for outcomes was better than in previous programming periods, but 2014-2020 will be much better.

Indeed, the purpose of the Commission in publishing its evaluation report now is surely to influence discussions over future financing — the mid-term review of the 2014-2020 spending period (currently being discussed by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers) and the post-2020 plans.

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We learnt long ago – and it was reiterated by the European Court of Auditors in its annual report this week — that the quality of what is done with EU money depends on the quality of local, regional and national administrations. The regional and cohesion funds are built on the assumption that the national governments will co-fund the projects (so they have a financial stake in their success) and that the projects are put forward by regional/national authorities (so there is local buy-in to the objectives). The period 2007-2013 will have been a difficult learning period for the administrations of the member states that joined the EU only in 2004 or later.

What compounded those difficulties still further was the economic crisis — a credit-crunch followed by recession and eurozone crisis — that broke shortly after the 2007-2013 spending period got underway. In theory, the EU funds are supposed to reduce disparities (between countries and within countries). In practice, they barely managed to prevent disparities widening still further. The EU reduced the requirements for co-funding.

The Commission has published a particularly striking table showing for each EU country the amount of ERDF and Cohesion Fund money received as a proportion of government capital expenditure. In four countries — Hungary, Lithuania, Slovakia and Latvia — it was more than half. In another five countries it was more than a third. And yet, across the EU as a whole, the average was just 6.5 percent. In Germany it was 2.5 percent, France 1.1 percent and the U.K. 1 percent.

The economics underlying that graph are that capital spending in countries like Hungary and Slovakia was already low and then plummeted after the economic crisis. Moreover, EU funding was — rightly — concentrated in the EU’s poorest countries. Hence EU funding was equivalent to such high proportions of a government’s capital spending.

But consider as well the politics of the graph: A country’s attitude to the EU — by which perhaps I mean gratitude for the EU — will probably be colored by its receipt of EU funds. Where a country is in receipt of so much EU money, relative to national spending, self-interest suggests it will value the EU. But where EU money is relatively insignificant, the EU’s value to that country will be less obvious.

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The true value of EU membership may well be membership of the European single market — as the British are belatedly debating — but politicians have habitually found it much easier to argue the benefits of the EU by pointing to motorways, railways, bridges and big infrastructure projects.

What the graph tells us is that the roads and bridges argument is already irrelevant to many of the wealthier countries. And in the poorer countries, there is no guarantee that the EU’s generosity is appreciated. Both Hungary and Slovakia have leaders who are ready to resort to Euroskeptic populism. How could Sweden look on the EU in the same way as Lithuania or Latvia?

The benefits of EU regional and cohesion spending have to be articulated differently: as a way of growing the potential market from which all parts of the EU can benefit; as a necessary accompaniment to a single currency; as a means to combat reducing inequality and economic disparities, which are damaging to overall economic growth.

Those arguments are rarely heard nowadays, with politicians afraid to put the case for transferring public money across national borders. It is fascinating to see German center-right politicians sniping at the EU budget, wanting a redeployment of resources to deal with migration, which they see as the all-important and all-consuming priority. Manfred Weber, a German Christian Democrat, who leads the center-right EPP in the European Parliament, this week said the EU should eliminate “unnecessary spending,” but he would struggle to get his own MEPs to agree on a definition of “unnecessary.”

We already know what the Commission’s response will be: to set stricter rules for the member states as they disburse EU funds; requiring tougher preconditions and smarter objectives and indicators. The pendulum has already swung. Many countries are so far behind in finding good projects that the structural fund and cohesion fund spending for 2014-2020 is way behind schedule. (Which will in due course create difficulties for the EU’s annual budgets; and for the negotiations on Brexit.)

The irony here is that as the EU’s spending gets smarter — more concentrated on the EU’s poorest areas, better targeted, with more sophisticated objectives — it will become less and less visible. As the European Court of Auditors reminded everyone this week, the misspending of EU money can make the institutions unpopular. What the auditors failed to point out is that there’s less and less electoral benefit to anyone from spending EU money wisely and well.

Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch.