Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe paper is devoted to an inspection of the new required policy targets and styles for assuring regional performance and competitiveness. Starting from the evidence of the long term persistence of regional imbalance in the EU, the paper highlights the major paradigm shifts that happened in spatial development theory – from development factors to innovation factors, from hard to soft elements, from functional to cognitive approaches – and points out the necessity for regional policies to address what is increasingly known as territorial capital. National and EU policies, and in particular macroeconomic, agricultural, transportation, R&D and excellence policies have a diversified impact on regions that are also well worth pinpointing. With the help of the regional forecasting model MASST, these impacts of national and regional policies on the regions of the EU are pointed out. Some reflections on the role and the aims of long term regional structural policies are highlighted.ResumenEste artículo se dedica a revisar los nuevos formatos y objetivos requeridos de las políticas para asegurar el rendimiento y la competitividad regionales. Partiendo de las pruebas de la persistencia a largo plazo del desequilibrio regional en la UE, el artículo resalta los principales cambios paradigmáticos en la teoría del desarrollo espacial – desde factores de desarrollo a factores de innovación, desde elementos duros a blandos, desde enfoques funcionales a cognitivos – e indica la necesidad de que las políticas regionales traten lo que se conoce cada vez más como capital territorial. Las políticas nacionales y de la UE, y en particular políticas macroeconómicas, agrícolas, de transporte, y de I+D y excelencia, tienen un impacto variado sobre las regiones que también merece la pena señalar. Con la ayuda del modelo de pronóstico regional MASST, se señalan dichos impactos de las políticas nacionales y regionales en las regiones de la UE. Ponemos de relieve varias reflexiones sobre el papel y objetivos de las políticas estructurales regionales a largo plazo.

The aim of the paper is to tackle the question of what the European territory will look like over the next fifteen years by providing quali–quantitative territorial scenarios for an enlarged Europe, under different assumptions about the future direction in which the driving forces affecting development will move. Based on an econometric model, called MASST, two scenarios are built on the bases of alternative strategies put in place by the EU 15, the New 12, and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries, on which alternative behavioural patterns in the driving forces of change depend. The scenarios presented are not policy scenarios: a more general approach is chosen, and more general issues of external competitiveness and global confrontation are emphasised and placed in the forefront of reflection, in an endeavour to define, through the use of the MASST simulation model, their likely impact on territorial trends, regional convergence, and general economic performance. Major determinants of territorial trends are attributed to the competitive game between the three above-mentioned blocks of countries. The model is able to provide the simulations for twenty-seven countries (the 'Old 15' EU members and the 'New 12' Eastern EU members) and for their 259 regions of GDP and population in 2015 in the two scenarios.

Normative interventions in the ICTs sector at the European level are in fact mainly driven by the idea that the impacts of advanced telecommunications technology adoptions are related both to their capacity to increase competitiveness and to their potential influence on regional disparities, enhancing growth rates and development of weaker and less developed regions. The result is that the well-known trade-off between efficiency and cohesion emerges quite evidently. In this paper, the aim is to provide an ex-ante evaluation of EU ICTs policies on regional development and regional disparities, through a scenario building methodology which allows to calculate the increase in per capita GDP at NUTS 2 level for all 15 EU member states according to efficiency or cohesion policy options. In particular, the aims are to provide a cost assessment of efficiency and cohesion ICTs policies and to detect different regional response to ICTs policies, by highlighting different behavioural attitudes and reacting capacities of regions in front of alternative ICTs policy scenarios.

The aim of the paper is to present a critical view of theoretical works on city size. We begin with the consideration that, during the 1960s and 1970s, the question of optimal city size tended to be expressed in a misleading way. The real issue is not 'optimal city size' but 'efficient size', which depends on the functional characteristics of the city and on the spatial organisation within the urban system. Economies of scale exist up to a certain city size. However, urban development generates conditions leading to structural readjustments which may create new economic advantages. These structural adjustments may either be sectoral trasformations towards higher-order functions, or increases in external linkages with other cities. The paper provides empirical evidence of these processes, and contains an econometric evaluation of urban location benefits and cost functions with respect to different levels of network integration, size and urban function. The model is applied to 58 Italian cities.

This timely book investigates the challenges that emerge for local economies when faced with the new globalization trends that characterize today's world economy. In this instance, globalization is interpreted as a process of internationalization of production and markets which can take various forms – such as increasing international trade or increasing foreign direct investments – all of which give rise to the growing integration and interdependency of European economies with regard to the other main world economies. The expert contributors use a fresh perspective in their analysis of globalization trends, emphasizing recent changes and providing an up-to-date picture of current developments in both foreign investments and the consequent migration of human capital. Qualitative rather than quantitative trends in human capital and financial capital flows are taken into account, with a particular focus on their impacts on regional growth perspectives. Highlighting the European economy's strengths and weaknesses in facing the challenges of the new globalization trends, this book will provide a stimulating read for a wide-ranging audience encompassing scholars of regional science, regional economics, economic and regional geography, international economics and international business.

The expert contributors illustrate that sources of regional competitiveness are strongly linked with spatially observable yet increasingly flexible realities, and include building advanced and efficient transport, communications and energy networks, changing urban and rural landscapes, and creating strategic and forward-looking competitiveness policies. They investigate long-term interactions between regional competitiveness and urban mobility, as well as the connections that link global sustainability with local technological and institutional innovations, and the intrinsic diversity of spatially rooted innovation processes. A prospective analysis on networks and innovation infrastructure is presented, global environmental issues such as climate change and energy are explored, and new policy perspectives, relevant world-wide, are prescribed.

Structural adjustment in the European Union emerged as the result of the 7-year crisis, providing risks and opportunities to national and regional economies. The effects that these structural changes will generate are difficult to be foreseen. This article builds after-crisis scenarios for Europe on the basis of alternative evolutions of these structural changes. On the basis of a regional forecasting model (MASST3), the article presents two opposite scenarios: the 'place-based' competitiveness' and the 'social cohesion' one. Results unexpectedly show that the place-based competitiveness scenario achieves both the highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates and the lowest increase in regional disparities.