Across all Nordic countries there is now an intensive debate on changing responsibilities and the division of labour between the state and the regions. Recent trends toward decentralisation have been accompanied by a further trend towards supranational centralisation. Besides the extensive adoption of European legislation into national law, this trend has been most notable in the field of macroeconomic policies. Although macroeconomic policies have no intended geographical bias, there are certainly unintended effects. An understanding of how the regional economy is affected is therefore necessary in order to make informed choices between different the policy designs and different policy instruments to be targeted at the regional level. In this report Stein Østbye, University of Tromsø, discusses some issues relevant to the Nordic countries concerning the local impact of European policy integration.