Human capital is of utmost importance for the future of our knowledge economies and societies. However, it is unequally distributed in Europe, contributing to marked spatial patterns of economic prosperity within and across countries. In many cases, these patterns have a long history. To understand them better, it requires to go back in time, when mass schooling was starting to become a reality across Europe. Taking a long-run perspective over more than 150 years, this book shows the development and the distribution of human capital in the regions of Europe and its connections with the economy. It provides insights into recent research findings in this area, including theoretical advances and the use of new empirical data.
This book investigates the EU’s regional growth dynamics and, in particular, the reasons why peripheral and socio-economically disadvantaged areas have persistently failed to catch up with the rest of the Union. It shows that the capability of the knowledge-based growth model to deliver its expected benefits to these areas crucially depends on tackling a specific set of socio-institutional factors which prevents innovation from being effectively translated into economic growth. The book takes an eclectic approach to the territorial genesis of innovation and regional growth by combining different theoretical strands into one model of empirical analysis covering the whole EU-25. An in-depth comparative analysis with the United States is also included, providing significant insights into the distinctive features of the European process of innovation and its territorial determinants. The evidence produced in the book is extensively applied to the analysis of EU development policies.
The book is aimed at a wide audience, including academics, economic geography, spatial planning and regional policy researchers, institutional leaders and managers, national and institutional policy makers, practitioners, administrators, master's and senior bachelor's students on related courses, general readers. A list of courses and corresponding programmes in Geography, Planning, Economics and Management will be prepared later.
Human capital plays a fundamental role in a knowledge-based economy, and is also a key element for reducing the gap between European regions and improving regional competitiveness and labour force quality. This study examines the contribution of human capital to growth and employment in France and Germany. It describes in detail the relations between a set of relevant indicators for improving human capital and its output in terms of productivity, wages and employment. It provides an estimation of private and social returns from schooling and training.
In Creating Cooperation, Pepper D. Culpepper explains the successes and failures of human capital reforms adopted by the French and German governments in the 1990s. Employers and employees both stand to gain from corporate investment in worker skills, but uncertainty and mutual distrust among companies doom many policy initiatives to failure. Higher skills benefit society as a whole, so national governments want to foster them. However, business firms often will not invest in training that makes their workers more attractive to other employers, even though they would prefer having better-skilled workers.Culpepper sees in European training programs a challenge typical of contemporary problems of public policy: success increasingly depends on the ability of governments to convince private actors to cooperate with each other. In the United States as in Europe, he argues, policy-makers can achieve this goal only by incorporating the insights of private information into public policy. Culpepper demonstrates that the lessons of decentralized cooperation extend to industrial and environmental policies. In the final chapter, he examines regional innovation programs in the United Kingdom and the clean-up of the Chesapeake Bay in the United States—a domestic problem that required the coordination of disparate agencies and stakeholders.
This book makes original contributions to the literature on clusters, human capital, and regional development by focusing on the link between entrepreneurship and economic growth, aiming for a better understanding of the dynamics of growth determined by the entrepreneur’s action in the regional space. The focus is therefore on critical reflection and rethinking the articulation between three levels of analysis of economic systems, namely entrepreneurship, human capital and regional development, which have not so far been perfectly articulated in the literature of reference on endogenous growth. Although there has been significant research so far into the success and failure of clusters, the implications of these multiple research efforts fail to provide political decision-makers and company managers with critical information about which mechanisms lie behind cluster success and also about how clusters survive and prosper. The innovative approaches presented in this book on entrepreneurship, human capital mobility and regional development have considerable potential to create new and original implications for decision-makers and managers. In terms of value added, this book contributes to the literature by seeking answers to the following questions: (i) Is the growth and success of clusters over time due to concentration and transmission of business competences through spin-offs located in a given regional space? (ii) Does increased density of job options outside the workplace contribute to increased mobility of human capital between firms located within clusters, and so improve coordination in the local labor market? (iii) Do spin-offs benefit from hiring workers from successful incumbents, inasmuch as those workers are expected to perform better than other workers from different origins? Integrating theoretical frameworks, empirical research, and regional case studies (from Portugal, Spain, Norway and Turkey), the editors and contributors demonstrate that the regional dynamics of industry growth are strongly influenced by the mobility of employees towards new firms.
