In this comment I will only tackle the growth problem - the big target that (up to now) the EU has missed - fully sharing the view of the Report that, without a more sustained growth, both cohesion and stability are at stake. In particular, I will concentrate on the US-EU comparison, which is...

The historical analysis of US regional growth is improved by augmenting existing estimates of state personal income per capita, extending previous studies of convergence across states, and more broadly, offering an improved basis for interpreting other issues in regional development such as the...