Co-evolutionary Patterns in Regional Knowledge Bases and Economic Structure: Evidence from European Regions

This paper analyses the co-evolutionary patterns of structural change in knowledge and economics. The former is made operational through an analysis of co-occurrences of technological classes in patent documents in order to derive indicators of coherence, variety and cognitive distance. The latter is made operational in a synthetic way by implementing shift-share analysis which decomposes labour productivity growth into effects caused by changes in the allocation of employment, those ascribed to intra-sector productivity growth, and those caused by interaction of these two components. The results of the analysis conducted on a sample of 227 European regions show that increasing variety is associated with the reallocation of the workforce across sectors whereas within-sector productivity is associated with high levels of both coherence and cognitive distance of the regional knowledge base.