This working paper offers a synthesis of the current knowledge on the determinants of productivity. It carefully reviews both “spatial” (e.g. agglomerations, infrastructure, geography) and “aspatial” (e.g. human capital, labour regulations, industry-level innovation and dynamism)...

This paper provides, for the first time, estimates of subjective well-being variables in 373 OECD subnational regions, allowing comparison of various measures of how people experience and evaluate their lives within and across all 34 OECD countries. Different weighting strategies as well as...

This paper investigates regional disparities in access to healthcare, measured by self-reported unmet medical needs. It looks at disparities across 86 regions in 5 European countries: Czech Republic, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. The results show that in addition to individual...

This paper analyses the role of cities in energy policies to build resilience and assesses related energy policy practices in cities. It analyses how energy affects resilience in cities from the economic, environmental, social and institutional perspectives. It also assesses the policy practices...

This paper examines the role of rural regions in the economic transformation of Korea. The analysis at regional level reveals that, while having experiencing continued urbanisation and rapid demographic shift of aging and depopulation, the Korean rural areas performs well in terms of...

Smart cities represent the future of urban development in Emerging Asia as more and more cities and countries resort to smart technologies to build more efficient and liveable urban environments, boost economic growth, foster well-being and facilitate citizen engagement. Policy makers in the...

The island of Ireland, which includes both Ireland and Northern Ireland (United Kingdom), is home to 6.4 million people and has a combined economic output of USD 205 billion. Several cross-border institutions were created in response to the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement to recreate...

The Top Technology Region/Eindhoven-Leuven-Aachen triangle (TTR-ELAt) is an initiative to support cross-border collaboration in a densely populated network of small and medium-sized cities located at the heart of western Europe with an annual economic output of USD 244 billion. The collaboration...

Estonia and Finland have centuries of collaboration, mainly between the capital areas of Tallinn and Helsinki that currently account for 2 million inhabitants and USD 76 billion in economic output. The entry of Estonia into the European Union and, since the mid-2000s, a two-hour ferry trip, have...

The Oresund is the most well-known example of European cross-border collaboration, building on the metropolitan area around Copenhagen and, across the sound, southern Sweden with the cities of Malmö, Lund and Helsingborg. Cross-border integration intensified following the opening of a...