 New grant aid is set for parts of the South Wales valleys |
First Minister Rhodri Morgan says �1.3bn from Europe for west Wales and the valleys will be targeted at skill levels before new roads or airports.
He said it would help workers gain the high level skills needed for Wales' future prosperity.
Wales' poorest areas have had over �1bn of Objective One aid since 2000, but it will dry up at the end of the year.
But economic activity in west Wales and the valleys is still estimated at under 75% of the European Union average.
So those areas will qualify for a further �1.3bn of European aid between 2007 and 2013.
Mr Morgan said: "We're talking about putting more emphasis on raising skills in the workforce and we're putting more emphasis on the human resources side."
He said less emphasis would be put on "pouring concrete and spending millions on highways, new airports and so forth".
He said the means used to allocate the Euro millions would be "more strategic" and less bureaucratic than in the past.
"It means fewer projects, but bigger ones, fewer programmes, but easier to understand ones," Mr Morgan said.
Wise spending required
The assembly government is consulting until 6 October on plans to spend the EU money.
 Rhondda has has benefited from Objective One money |
The first minister visited Brussels this week to discuss initial spending plans with Danuta Hubner, the EU Commissioner responsible for regional aid.
But the Confederation of British Industry's director in Wales said lessons had to be learned in allocating funds, as he argued that European money had not always been wisely spent.
David Rosser hoped the funding, known as "convergence" funding, would be more strategically allocated than the Objective One scheme.
Mr Rosser said: "That resulted in many hundreds of projects, some of which were very good, some of which I think fell rather wide from the mark and didn't focus on increasing wealth.
"This time I think we need to take a more strategic approach. We need to introduce fewer, large-scale projects which we can apply across the convergence funding area to have a greater impact."
Communities
Conservative economic development spokesman Alun Cairns agreed that fewer projects should be supported.
But he was worried that a more "strategic" approach to funding might mean too much direction from the assembly government and insufficient input from local authorities.
Mr Cairns said: "It's now going to be completely the opposite to last time, which will be a 'top-down' approach telling communities, telling local authorities exactly what they should be doing."
The assembly government has described the new European funding as a "golden scenario" for Wales.
But this is only because in large parts of Wales income per head is significantly below the EU average.
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