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This paper analyses the relationship between country and European identity, and how Cohesion Policy can influence it. While the two sentiments are positively correlated, empirical evidence shows that this association significantly decreased in the last two decades, jointly with an increase in the support of nationalisms and Eurosceptic parties. It is therefore interesting to understand what is the role of EU regional policy in mediating citizens' identification. To elements of Cohesion Policy are expected to be associated to the citizens' preference for their country over Europe: the intensity of funding and the perceived outcome of EU regional policy. Results show that regional divergence is mirrored by a divergence also in identity, i.e. citizens identify more and more with their country and less with Europe. On the other hand, the intensity of funding is substantially neutral in this process.

This paper studies the determinants of the imbalance between country and European identity. While the two sentiments are positively correlated, recent empirical evidence showed the emergence, in the last years, of an increasing imbalance in favour of the identification with individuals' country of residence. In the political arena, this phenomenon is accompanied by the increasing support to nationalisms and Eurosceptic parties almost everywhere in the EU. It is therefore interesting to understand what are the individual and contextual factors associated to this identity imbalance. The assumption tested in this paper is that the unequal distribution (among individuals and regions) of the benefits from EU integration is the main determinant of the emerging antagonism between European and national identity. Empirical results support this hypothesis. Individuals with lower education and income, and those living in the lagging-behind regions of the EU are more likely than the others to identify more with their own country than with Europe. ; Este artículo estudia los determinantes del desequilibrio entre la identidad de país y la europea. Si bien los dos sentimientos están positivamente correlacionados, la evidencia empírica reciente mostró la aparición, en los últimos años, un desequilibrio creciente a favor de la identificación con el país de residencia de las personas. En el ámbito político, este fenómeno se acompaña del creciente apoyo a los nacionalismos y los partidos euroescépticos en casi toda la UE. Por lo tanto, es interesante entender cuáles son los factores individuales y contextuales asociados a este desequilibrio de identidad. El supuesto que se contrasta en este documento es que la distribución desigual (entre individuos y regiones) de los beneficios de la integración de la UE es el principal determinante del antagonismo emergente entre la identidad europea y nacional. Los resultados empíricos respaldan esta hipótesis. Las personas con educación e ingresos más bajos, y aquellos que viven en las ...

Many times governments and policy makers have to choose among different projects or policies to implement. In principle, the best choice is the one which maximizes the social welfare that, in turn, depends on individual preferences. But very often preferences are unknown and even not observable. In practice, a common procedure is to directly ask a sample of individuals about their preferences, which are therefore stated by agents rather than revealed by their behaviour. Methods for preference revelation can be classified into two broad families. The first one involves the case in which respondents are asked to simulate their market behaviour in a fictitious context designed by the researcher. The final goal of these studies is the estimation of willingness to pay (WTP), or willingness to accept (WTA), for changes in provision of non-market goods. A large literature investigates both theoretical issues connected with these procedures (Bates, 1988) and empirical results from country experiences (Mackie at al., 2003). The second family of surveys are commonly employed in public opinion analysis. In this case respondents are asked to reveal their current attitudes, whilst in some circumstances they are required to state their satisfaction with a certain policy or service. In the last decades the interest towards such analysis largely increased and a broad amount of surveys have been systematically collected (Rabin, 2002). Whatever the kind of analysis, when individuals correctly report the behaviour they would keep in a real context, or honestly admit their attitudes and perceptions, the target of the policy maker is reached. Hence, the issue of reliability of stated preferences becomes crucial in order to understand what we can learn from surveys and how SP analysis can be exploited by policy makers. Our research question is simply the following one: can we trust in SP methods? In order to answer this question the work is organised in three sections. The first one is devoted to the definition of the concept of "reliability". In the first place, the latter depends on the family of SP methods we are dealing with. When individuals are required to replicate their market behaviour in a fictitious scenario, two perspectives can be applied: the first one based on mainstream economic theory (Hicks and Allen, 1934) and the other one in accordance to the so called behavioural programme (Sunstein and Thaler, 2008). Both approaches are discussed, pointing out the problematic issues which characterise each methodology and trying to propose a definition for the concept of reliability. The second family of surveys can be classified into two sub-groups, based on the object of the analysis. The first group includes all situations where agents are required to reveal their actual behaviour (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2001) while the second one is composed by those studies in which agents are asked to express their feelings or perceptions about a certain aspect of their life (McFadden et al. 2005). Again, the concept of reliability has been investigated for each group of surveys. The second and the third sections are devoted to empirical works which try, recalling the definition of reliability suggested in the first chapter, to apply this concept to empirical studies.

The literature on the geography of subjective well-being largely converges in pointing out the occurrence, at least in developed countries, of an urban/rural divide: people living in the most urbanized regions tend to be significantly less satisfied than those living in rural areas. This paper aims at reassessing this statement by taking into consideration an important aspect, frequently overlooked in the literature, i.e. people-based characteristics. Individuals are not alike and may differently experience and appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of urbanisation. Characteristics such as the level of education, the type of occupation and, more generally, the income level can mediate the capacity to reap urbanisation advantages (as the accessibility to advanced services and diversified job markets) and mitigate urbanization disadvantages (such as cost of living and congestion). Additionally, but based on the same reasoning, more educated and affluent individuals (negatively) value distance from top rank centres more than less educated and affluent ones. We test and prove these propositions in a study on the subjective well-being of more than 250,000 individuals living in European cities, defined as NUTS3 regions, in the period 2004-2010.

AbstractThis paper analyses the relationship between demographic decline and economic development in Russian regions in the period 1998–2012, demonstrating how shrinking regions undertook different economic growth patterns. In some cases, population decline was associated with an effective restructuring of the regional economic system. Successful shrinking regions appear to have, at the beginning of the period, a higher endowment of private capital and a higher share of the young population than the other shrinking regions. In 2012, these differences were even broader, suggesting the potential occurrence of a vicious cycle for the unsuccessful shrinking regions, for which the process of depopulation did not probably stop here.

AbstractThe understanding of the role of Cohesion Policy on the processes of European identity building is becoming more and more important in a period or resurgence of nationalisms and Euroscepticism. However, empirical evidence on this is still extremely scarce, due to both conceptual issues and data limitations. The present study tackles these limits and presents an empirical analysis of the way in which satisfaction with Cohesion Policy affected identification with Europe in EU regions between 2014 and 2017. Results show that this relationship is highly dependent on the intensity of funding spent, capturing the intensity of the European policy, and on the recent economic trend occurred at the regional level. This effect is boosted by a positive attitude towards EU institutions.

The present chapter reviews the recent studies of the group of regional and urban economics on the impact of the European Union regional policy on regional development. In particular, the focus of the research program is on the identification of the mechanisms through which the local territorial characteristics mediate the effect of public investments. Results show a strong relationship between the territorial capital of regions and the effectiveness of the EU regional policy. This evidence conveys relevant implications for policy makers. In particular, it suggests that regions should invest in those assets that are complementary to the ones which they already have, in order to build a balanced economic system.

The role of Cohesion Policy in the process of European identity building is an extremely relevant issue, even if few studies focused on it. The present work has the aim to work on the relationship between Cohesion Policy and European values, providing two main original contributions to the literature. Firstly, it discusses the logical chain linking the implementation of Cohesion Policy to the formation of EU values. In doing this, it identifies the context conditions related to the local policy implementation settings that are likely to favour awareness and satisfaction of citizens with the Communitarian policy program. Secondly, it provides original evidence on the determinants of the perception of Cohesion Policy, testing the role of the context conditions. As a main result, the work finds out that "individual / private / subjective" needs have to be fulfilled in order for Cohesion Policy to contribute to the EU identity building process, independently from the capacity of EU actions to accomplish their main goal, i.e. that of fulfilling "real / collective / objective" needs of the regions. ; COHESIFY Research paper 5. COHESIFY WP2 -- Task 2.3: Output 2.3

The way in which Cohesion Policy is perceived by citizens is a crucial issue for the process of European identity-building. Based on the idea that citizens' perceptions depend on the local socioeconomic context in which Cohesion Policy is implemented, the paper seeks to define alternative combinations of the economic, social and institutional features of different local policy implementation settings, and to identify them empirically in European NUTS-2 regions. The results highlight a broad variety of policy settings, whose characteristics are relevant to the outcome of Cohesion Policy implementation. Read the transcript Watch the video on Vimeo