Special Issue on Regional Economic Development

Regional Studies, 2012

Crespo Cuaresma J., Doppelhofer G. and Feldkircher M. The determinants of economic growth in European regions, Regional Studies. This paper uses Bayesian model averaging (BMA) to find robust determinants of economic growth between 1995 and 2005 in a new data set of 255 European regions. It finds that income convergence between countries is dominated by the catching-up of regions in new member states in Central and Eastern Europe, whereas convergence within countries is driven by regions in old European Union member states. Regions containing capital cities are growing faster, particularly in Central and Eastern European countries, as do regions with a large share of workers with a higher education. The results are robust when allowing for spatial spillovers among European regions.Crespo CUARESMA J., DOPPELHOFER G. and FELDKIRCHER M. 欧洲区域经济成长的决定因素，区域研究。本论文使用贝式模型平均法(BMA)，在欧洲255个区域的新数据集中，寻找1995至2005年间经济成长的决定要素。研究发现，各国所得的趋同，主要是由中、东欧新成员国区域的追赶所引发；而国家内部的趋同则是由几个资深欧盟成员国所在区域所促动。首都城市所在之区域成长较为快速，尤其对中欧及东欧国家而言是如此；受过高等教育劳工比例较高的区域成长亦较为快速。考虑欧洲区域的空间外溢，以上研究结果是相当坚实的。Crespo Cuaresma J., Doppelhofer G. et Feldkircher M. Les déterminants de la croissance économique dans les régions d'Europe, Regional Studies. Cet article emploie la méthode du ‘Bayesian Model Averaging’ (BMA) afin de dévoiler, à partir d'un nouvel ensemble de données auprès de 255 régions d'Europe, les déterminants fiables de la croissance économique entre 1995 et 2005. Il s'avère que la convergence des revenus sur le plan international est dominée par le rattrapage des régions situés dans les nouveaux pays membres de l'Europe centrale et orientale, alors que la convergence au sein des pays est pilotée par les régions dans les anciens pays membres de l'Union européenne. Les régions qui englobent les capitales semblent croître plus rapidement, surtout dans les pays de l'Europe centrale et orientale, comme le fait les régions dotées d'une part importante des travailleurs qualifiés. Quand on tient compte des retombées géographiques parmi les régions européennes, les résultats s'avèrent fiables.Crespo Cuaresma J., Doppelhofer G. und Feldkircher M. Determinanten des Wirtschaftswachstums in europäischen Regionen, Regional Studies. In diesem Beitrag ermitteln wir anhand eines neuen Datensatzes von 255 europäischen Regionen mit Hilfe der Methode des Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) robuste Determinanten des Wirtschaftswachstums im Zeitraum von 1995 bis 2005. Wir stellen fest, dass die Einkommenskonvergenz zwischen verschiedenen Ländern von einem Aufholen der Regionen in den neuen mittel- und osteuropäischen Mitgliedstaaten der Europäischen Union beherrscht wird, während die Konvergenz innerhalb eines Landes von den Regionen der alten EU-Mitgliedstaaten ausgeht. Regionen mit Hauptstädten wachsen insbesondere in mittel- und osteuropäischen Ländern schneller; dasselbe gilt für Regionen mit einem hohen Anteil von Arbeitnehmern mit Hochschulbildung. Die Ergebnisse sind auch bei Berücksichtigung von räumlichen Übertragungen zwischen europäischen Regionen robust.Crespo Cuaresma J., Doppelhofer G. y Feldkircher M. Los determinantes del crecimiento económico en las regiones europeas, Regional Studies. En este artículo utilizamos los promedios de modelo bayesiano para averiguar los determinantes sólidos del crecimiento económico entre 1995 y 2005 en un nuevo grupo de datos de 255 regiones europeas. Observamos que la convergencia de ingresos entre los países está dominada por la convergencia de las regiones en los nuevos Estados miembros en Europa central y oriental, mientras que la convergencia dentro de los países está determinada por las regiones en los antiguos Estados miembros de la Unión Europea. Las regiones con capitales crecen más rápidamente, sobre todo en los países de Europa central y oriental, igual que las regiones con un alto porcentaje de trabajadores con un alto nivel de estudios. Los resultados son sólidos cuando se tienen en cuenta desbordamientos espaciales entre las regiones europeas.

SAGE Open, 2011

There is a huge literature regarding the main determinants and sources of economic growth. Most of the recent work emphasizes on the role of knowledge and innovation activities typically produced by a specific sector of the economy, and on analyzing the implications and the importance for economic growth. Moreover, the socioeconomic and public policies aim to distinguish the determining factors of growth to enhance the regional cohesion and the convergence process. Much of the recent work on regional growth can be viewed as refining the basic economic insights of economic geography. This article attempts to analyze the European systems of innovation and the effects of European technological policy to regional growth.

Journal of Regional Science, 2004

This paper models externalities of production across regional economies. Under the assumption that knowledge diffuses without political or administrative barriers, we derive externalities that affect the steady state and the process of growth of each economy. The empirical counterpart of the reduced form equation summarizing the process of growth allows us to test for the presence of regional spillovers and to measure their magnitude. Our results for a sample of European regions show that spillovers are far from negligible, are robust to the consideration of variables within each region, and may cause nondecreasing returns at the spatial aggregate level. The paper also relates previous empirical evidence on spatial dependence in growth studies to the externalities modeled here. 43 *Raymond Florax and Bernard Fingleton provided useful comments on earlier drafts. Three anonymous referees also provided comments that greatly improved the paper. We also want to thank the current and previous editors for comments and encouragement. Authors acknowledge financial support from

Most of the recent contributions based on spatial econometrics which measure convergence among regions rely on a cross-sectional estimation of the model. However, this type of approach presents two main drawbacks. The first one is the lack of consideration for increasing returns to scale, which are at the origin of endogenous growth and new economic geography models. The second one is that it does not consider explicitly the role of space on the development process. In that purpose, we find more appropriate to use Fingleton's (2001) model which links manufacturing labor productivity growth to manufacturing output growth and technology gap. We extend this specification to the case of 244 European regions over 1991-2003. In addition, we develop a spatial method to endogenously detect and include the presence of spatial heterogeneity in our sample. The conclusions give new insights for policy-makers interested in convergence and regional policies developed to promote it.

This thesis investigates the role of human capital and innovation activity in the process of economic growth within a system of regions. It starts by reviewing existing theories of economic growth paying particular attention to the literature on "endogenous growth", the large body of empirical literature addressing economic growth and that has investigated the "convergence issue". A methodology based on the direct analysis of cross-sectional distributions of per capita income is then developed and applied to per capita income data for 122 European Union (EU) functionally defined regions over the period 1979-1990. The results show a clear tendency for some of the richest European regions to grow away from the others. The comparison of these results with those derived from a similar analysis for the commonly used administrative regions of the EU reveals some significant distortions imposed by adopting an administrative definition. A formal theoretical explanation of these results is then offered. In particular, it is argued that regional disparities in per capita income owe their existence to the pattern of specialisation between 'knowledge creating' and 'knowledge applying' regions. Specialisation is explained in terms of differences in the availability of useful knowledge at different locations. In the perfect foresight, stable equilibrium of the two-region model developed here, therefore, the region that specialises in innovation related activities (knowledge creating) enjoys a permanently higher level of per capita income. Moreover, it is shown that, on reasonable assumptions, a process of integration that reduces the cost of physical distance leads to faster growth in the long-run for the system as a whole, but at the expense of an increase in regional disparities. 4 Finally, some predictions are derived and tested empirically. Using cross-sectional regressions, the fundamental determinants of the growth rate of a region are investigated. The results are supportive of the model, confirming the role played by the concentration of innovative activities and spatial spillovers of knowledge.

Growth and Change, 2000

The traditional empirical approaches to the analysis of economic growth, cross-section and panel data regressions are substantially uninformative with respect to the issue of convergence. Whether national or regional economies appear to converge in terms of per capita income or productivity levels (the so-called βconvergence) critically depends on the way in which the empirical model is specified. Traditional specifications witness a disproportionate presence of proxies for forces leading towards divergence among the conditioning variables. It is therefore hardly surprising that these analyses find a positive and statistically significant value for the estimate of the speed of convergence. A more constructive use of cross-section and panel data regressions is in the analysis of the determinants of growth. The present paper therefore builds on recent work on the role of different growth determinants (Cheshire and Carbonaro 1996) and analyses the growth performance of 122 Functional Urban Regions (FURs) over the period 1978-1994. This model explicitly recognizes growth as a multivariate process. In this new formulation it incorporates a spatialized adaptation of Romer's endogenous growth model (Romer 1990), developing the work of Magrini (Magrini 1997). Magrini's model originated from the view that technological knowledge has a very important tacit component that has been neglected in formal theories of endogenous growth. This tacit component, being the non-written personal heritage of individuals or groups, is naturally concentrated in space. As a result, technological change is profoundly influenced by the interaction between firms and their local environments. The present paper reports the results of the estimation of a fully specified model of regional growth in per capita income. Particular attention is played to the role of research and development (R&D) activities, and to the influence of factors such as Universities that shape the local environments and have important policy implications.

Papers in Regional Science, 2006

The main aim of this paper is to study the European regional disparities in the labour market, considering the regional productive structures and some regional institutional variables. It is widely known that one of the EU's most important stylized facts are the regional disparities among regions. Such differences are related mostly to the income per capita and to the labour market captured through the unemployment rates. In a recent paper (Amendola, Caroleo Coppola, 2004) we analyzed the economic structure of the EU's regions through some proxies of the productive assets and of the labour markets. In this paper we estimate a Panel data where the dependent variable is the regional unemployment rate and the independent variables are some variables related to the productive structure and some regional institutional aspects. The results we obtain confirm that the institutional variables, such as the centralization of wage bargaining, the decentralization of public expenditure and the bureaucracy level, play an important impacts on the unemployment rates.

1998

One of the main problems of the European countries is their small capacity to generate employment. This is an important point because of the social and human problems that it produces, which are more serious in the case of peripheral regions. In this paper, we make a comparative analysis of employment and economic growth among the main EU countries. We study the reason of the more reduced rates of employment in several EU countries. Then, we analyse the generation of employment in the European regions, especially in the peripheral ones which are the most affected by unemployment.

Abstract Understanding the forces driving regional growth in the EU is a major challenge for academics and policy-makers. The opening of national borders has exposed regional economies to an extremely competitive, free-market, integrated economic environment, affecting their patterns of development. EU regions should, thus, be understood not only as national, geographic and administrative, sub-divisions, but also as integral parts of the EU economic space.

The differences among the regions of Europe are not only those of income and employment, but there are many other important and different circumstances affecting social welfare: education, health, justice or public satisfaction with government institutions. The purpose of this paper will be to analyse the differences among regions by means of social welfare and economic indicators. Furthermore, with the use of econometric models, we will identify the causal factors underlying these varying circumstances.

2005

Is inequality good or bad for growth? This issue, with its important political bearings, has attracted much attention in the past in the economic literature. Starting from the seminal work of , in the literature there is some empirical evidence that economies with unequal distribution of income grow faster than those with an even income distribution.

2008

The objective of this paper is to analyze the effects on regional manufacturing productivity of various external factors that characterize the economic, social, and institutional environments to which they belong. We define and distinguish here between homogeneous and urban heterogeneous external economies. Hypotheses of the existence and co-existence of the two types of external effects are formulated and tested for six manufacturing subsectors of the regions of 13 western EU countries from 1995 to 2004. Although the available data are far from optimal, the empirical analysis that they enable provides various insights that partly corroborate our conjectures. In particular, the results supply evidence of the generalized beneficial effects of urban heterogeneous agglomeration. They also reveal the complexity and sector-specificity of the effects of industry specialization patterns.

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics, 2021

Social capital is an important factor explaining differences in economic growth among regions. However, the key distinction between bonding social capital, which can lead to lock-in and myopia, and bridging social capital, which promotes knowledge flows across diverse groups, has been overlooked in growth research. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by examining how bonding and bridging social capital affect regional economic growth, using data for 190 regions in 21 EU countries, covering eight waves of the European Social Survey between 2002 and 2016. The findings confirm that bridging social capital is linked to higher levels of regional economic growth. Bonding social capital is highly correlated with bridging social capital and associated with lower growth when this is controlled for. We do not find significantly different effects of bonding social capital in regions with more or less bridging social capital, or vice versa. We examine the interaction between social and human capital, finding that bridging social capital is fundamental for stimulating economic growth, especially in low-skilled regions. Human capital also moderates the relationship between bonding social capital and growth, reducing the negative externalities imposed by excessive bonding.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

We conduct a systematic study of the impact of European Union (EU) regional policies on regional economic growth that controls for national policies and geographic characteristics. Special care is taken in distinguishing between the impact of EU policies and of national policies on economic growth. Our empirical study tries to answer two different questions. First, is there convergence across EU regions, and if so, do regions converge to a common European steady-state or to a national one? Second, how do European and national policies affect regional growth? We find evidence of regional convergence at the national level but not at the European level. In addition we find that trade openness at the national level is associated with regional convergence while European regional policies contribute, though weakly, to regional convergence. Our results suggest that policies that foster market integration-and convergence to a common steady-state-such as the promotion of labour and capital movements across countries and common regulatory policies are as important for European-wide regional convergence as regional structural funds.