Tackling the question of what the European territory will look like over the next fifteen years, this volume provides quali-quantitative territorial scenarios for the enlarged Europe, under different assumptions on future globalisation strategies of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and East and West European countries. The approach is as neutral as possible vis-à-vis the results, leading to a new forecasting model, the MASST model, built by the authors.
The book spans a scientific research program elegantly developed by Roberto Camagni, an eminent regional scientist, who has offered ground-breaking ideas in regional and urban economics throughout his academic career. In addition to bringing together a selection of Professor Camagni’s most influential works, the book presents syntheses and interpretations of his ideas by respected colleagues and by his students. In regional economics, space as territory, which plays an active role in innovation processes and in regional growth patterns; territorial capital as a synthetic concept of differentiated regional growth assets; and sources of regional competitiveness are only a few of the main ideas that emerged in regional economics thanks to this inspiring mind. In urban economics, he paved the way towards a new theoretical interpretation of the existence of the city and of its dynamics. His theory of city networks overcame the limits of Christaller’s and Lösch’s spatial approach to the city, with a solid economic conceptualization of spatial city network structures. All theories are accompanied by sound policy analysis, helping to contribute to the design and implementation of appropriate spatial policies at the European level.
'The rise of endogenous growth thinking has produced an understanding that the national and in fact the global economy depends generally on supply side initiatives that for the most part are driven at the local regional level. Focusing endogenous forces at the regional level has become elemental in our thinking about development and competitiveness at all levels. This book demonstrates that building and testing "local after-crisis scenarios" before crises occur informs policy and leadership at the critical flex points along the regional development horizon.' Roger Stough, George Mason University, US This up-to-date and insightful book presents post-crisis scenarios for European regions with new methodologies and tools to support quantitative assessment and foresight. The aim is to develop regional forecasting methodologies and tools, appropriate to the regional-local scale but consistent with a general EU-wide approach. This effort is particularly important in a period of economic crisis, as an economic downturn generates high uncertainty about the future of economic systems, and consequently will determine the new winners and losers in a globalized world. An interesting picture of diverse and alternative post-crisis territorial development paths is provided for a case study of the Latin Arc countries (Spain, France and Italy) and the Latin Arc Provinces Network, running along the Western Mediterranean coast. Policy suggestions for the case study area are then built on the scenario results. Spatial Scenarios in a Global Perspective will strongly appeal to regional economists, economic geographers and policy makers as well as students in regional economics, geography and international business.
'Global trends and local effects have been almost ubiquitous since the 1980s. However, few, like this book, have successfully examined the local effects of global trends and processes. Each of this book's ten chapters provides an empirically based analysis that illuminates the local effects driven by global forces.' – Roger Stough, George Mason University, US This timely book investigates the challenges that emerge for local economies when faced with the new globalization trends that characterize today's world economy. In this instance, globalization is interpreted as a process of internationalization of production and markets which can take various forms – such as increasing international trade or increasing foreign direct investments – all of which give rise to the growing integration and interdependency of European economies with regard to the other main world economies. the expert contributors use a fresh perspective in their analysis of globalization trends, emphasizing recent changes and providing an up-to-date picture of current developments in both foreign investments and the consequent migration of human capital. Qualitative rather than quantitative trends in human capital and financial capital flows are taken into account, with a particular focus on their impacts on regional growth perspectives. Highlighting the European economy's strengths and weaknesses in facing the challenges of the new globalization trends, this book will provide a stimulating read for a wide-ranging audience encompassing scholars of regional science, regional economics, economic and regional geography, international economics and international business.
This book examines emerging hypotheses, new methods and theoretic developments in regional economic development. It offers a diverse set of case studies, ranging from a focus on Europe, Central and East Asia and North America.
After a description of the new forms of globalization currently shaping our world, and of their possible spatial effects, the book highlights which European regions have in the past succeeded in taking advantage of globalization trends and identifies the major reasons for their success. The book also offers a prospective analysis utilizing scenarios based on different assumptions of how globalization trends will develop, identifying the regional winners and losers for each scenario. The analysis greatly benefits from a unique database which contains, among others, data on FDI by sector and professions at the regional Nuts-2 level for all 27 EU countries. A time-span of more than 10 years is covered, and scenarios are developed for the future development up to 2020.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of contemporary issues of regional development. It places particular emphasis on its socio-economic and socio-political determinants which accompany the problem of existing and ever-widening differences in the level of regional development in various parts of Europe. In order to diagnose the scale of those differences and to indicate the main forces behind the divergence of development, the authors propose an original systematisation of regional development factors, drawing attention to the need to consider them within the framework of present-day socio-economic megatrends. The proposed approach to the development factors is also used for the author's operationalisation of the concept of territorial capital, which is at the centre of regional place-based policy. The wide spatial aspect of the analysis (national and local) and its extensive temporal scope (2004-2019) yields unique results and creates an important element of added value for this book, which shows the regularities of the process of regional development in Europe at three spatial levels - pan-European, national and intra-regional. Furthermore, it indicates the challenges faced by regionalists who attempt to carry out research on different territorial levels with a diverse number of units (205 EU regions, 16 Polish voivodeships, 2,478 Polish local units) and extended observation periods (2004-2017). The solutions proposed by the authors, who show the potential of overcoming the barriers resulting from limited access to complete and comparable statistical data series, should be inspiring for many researchers. The unique results of direct research carried out on a large sample of respondents and entrepreneurs via diverse field research techniques constitute a valuable source of information on local conditions that impact contemporary development processes in less developed regions. Their value is even greater because they were carried out in a unique laboratory created by the authors for testing the regularity of formation and impact of socio-economic development factors in various locally determined conditions of this process. It consists of purposefully selected test units (LAU2). Located in a less developed region, they represent all growth types and functional test units identified in the course of the research. Consequently, the results obtained may be generalised and applied to other areas showing similar features of territorial capital. The monograph is addressed primarily to a wide group of regionalists connected with economic and social sciences as well as to practitioners involved in the implementation of development policies at various levels.
The aim of this Handbook is to take stock of regional competitiveness and complementary concepts as a means of presenting a state-of-the-art discussion of the contemporary theories, perspectives and empirical explanations that help make sense of the determinants of uneven development across regions. Drawing on an international field of leading scholars, the book is assembled and organized so that readers can first learn about the theoretical underpinnings of regional competitiveness and development theory, before moving on to deeper discussions of key factors and principal elements, the emergence of allied concepts, empirical applications, and the policy context.
Economic agents interact in structural relationships through time and space. This work starts from the empirical observation that all three dimensions, namely time, space, and structural functional forms, are important for an integrative framework of modern empirical analysis in regional science. The work thus aims at combining up-to-date econometric tools from the fields of spatial econometrics, panel time-series analysis and structural simultaneous equation modelling to analysis the different research questions at hand. Most of the topics dealt within this work start from a concrete empirical problem, while problem solving also aims at generating some new knowledge in a methodological way, e.g. by the complementary use of Monte Carlo simulation studies to compare the empirical performance of different estimators for specific data samples. Following a first introductory chapter, the work is structured in three parts addressing major issues in building up a stylized regional economic model such as interregional migration, factor and final demand estimation. All empirical applications use German regional data.
