The spatial patterns of changes in economic diversion and convergence have become more blurred in the last decades. International disparities between nations have diminished. At the same time intra-national disparities have increased in most European countries. In the search to identify the...

The measure of the regional disparities in the European Union was widely approached on the literature. Recent years have seen a spate of studies taking into account the spatial aspect of data in the analysis of convergence from an empirical viewpoint, or integrating spatial interdependencies...

We use the case of EU enlargement in 2004 to investigate the impact of economic integration on regional income growth. Being particularly interested in studying the effects ‘at the margin’, we track the relative performance of regions adjacent to both sides of the integration border...

This paper analyzes the impact of the German structure program "Joint Task for the Improvement of Regional Economic Structures" (GRW) on regional economic growth. The paper extends the existing literature by several aspects. First of all, using the popular augmented Solow model by Mankiw et al....

The European Union (EU) provides grants to disadvantaged regions of member states to allow them to catch up with the EU average. Under the Objective 1 scheme, NUTS2 regions with a GDP per capita level below 75% of the EU average qualify for structural funds transfers from the central EU budget....

This paper provides evidence on the role of net fiscal transfers to households and EU structural funds for per-capita output convergence across a large sample of European regions during the period 1995-2005. We find that net fiscal transfers, while achieving regional redistribution, seem to...

This paper sets out to examine the impact of the quality of local and regional governments on the returns of investment, focusing on the returns of EU structural and cohesion funds. Despite the widespread belief that the quality of government affects the returns of public investments, whether...

In this paper, the process of productivity convergence is investigated for the enlarged European Union using regional (NUTS-2) data. The Solow model extended by human capital is employed as a workhorse. Alternative strategies are proposed to control for spatial effects. All specifications...