European regional growth patterns have undergone two important changes in recent years. First, the process of convergence that dominated regional growth until the late 1970s and early 1980s has progressively given way to stability and divergence. Economic dynamism is increasingly concentrated in...

Recent research has highlighted that in the last few years the evolution of regional disparities in many European states has become pro-cyclical. This represents a change with respect to the predominantly anti-cyclical pattern of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper addresses the question of whether...

European regional support has grown in parallel with European integration. The funds targeted at achieving greater economic and social cohesion and reducing disparities within the European Union (EU) have more than doubled in relative terms since the end of the 1980s, making development policies...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the endogenous factors allowing regions to compete successfully in a globalized economy. These factors are expected to vary across different groups of regions, due to their different specialization and different endowment of structural connections with the...

While it is clear that the ability of firms to introduce new products or processes is crucially affected by their choice of innovation partners, the geographical dimension of these partnerships has until fairly recently attracted relatively little attention. Yet, the factors which drive firms to...

This paper analyses whether the different powers and resources at the disposal of local and regional governments across Europe deliver greater satisfaction with political institutions and lead to greater personal happiness. The analysis uses microdata from the four available waves of the...

Does the nationality of migrants arriving in any particular territory make a difference for long-term economic development? Have Irish, German or Italian settlers arriving in the US at the turn of the 20th century left an institutional trace which determines economic development differences to...

Recent papers show that the impact of Cohesion Policy is not uniform in space but larger, smaller or insignificant depending on the regions. These outcomes mostly depend on the characteristics of each territory (conditioning factors). This paper reviews them and investigates, through descriptive...

The paper is devoted to developing quantitative foresights on the three integrated scenarios presented in the previous chapter. In particular, a short summary of the methodological aspects of quantitative foresights is provided; and, especially, the empirical results obtained at regional and...

By international comparison as well as compared to other EU policies, the EU's Cohesion Policy (CP) evaluation system is far developed and institutionalized. This paper analyses the remaining gaps and shortcomings in the CP evaluation system against principles established by the OECD and others...