The knowledge regions in the enlarged Europe

Alessandra Colombelli, M. Foddi () and Raffaele Paci

Working Paper CRENoS from Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia

Abstract: Since the Lisbon agenda in 2000, Europe stated the goal to become the most advanced knowledge economy in the world relying specifically on the increase and strengthen of its human capital and technological endowments. However, given the presence of localized externalities in the knowledge accumulation process, this policy may produce distortive and unwanted consequences at the territorial level reinforcing the existing high inequalities among regions. Another crucial feature to be considered is the recent enlargement process of the European Union which has brought on stage new players characterized by a low average level of knowledge activity accompanied by a huge degree of internal territorial disparity. The aim of this paper is to identify the "knowledge regions" in Europe and to examine their main territorial features. To this aim we first build, for 287 regions belonging to 31 European countries, a comprehensive picture of the two variables - human capital and technological activity - which constitute the main pillars of the knowledge economy. We compute two synthetic indicators for human capital and technology and, on the basis of these two dimensions, we identify 74 knowledge regions, mainly located in the centre and north of Europe. This results are confirmed by a cluster analysis.

Keywords: knowledge; human capital; technological activity; regions; europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 O30 O52 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-ino, nep-knm, nep-sbm and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://crenos.unica.it/crenos/node/3276
https://crenos.unica.it/crenos/sites/default/files/WP11-10.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The knowledge regions in the enlarged Europe (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cns:cnscwp:201110

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper CRENoS from Centre for North South Economic Research, University of Cagliari and Sassari, Sardinia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CRENoS ().