Regional inequality in Europe: evidence, theory and policy implications

Simona Iammarino, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Michael Storper

No 1817, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: Regional economic divergence has become a threat to economic progress, social cohesion and political stability in Europe. Market processes and policies that are supposed to spread prosperity and opportunity are no longer sufficiently effective. The evidence points to the existence of several different modes of regional economic performance in Europe, responding to different development challenges and opportunities. Both mainstream and heterodox theories have gaps in their ability to explain the existence of these different regional trajectories and the weakness of the convergence processes among them. Therefore, a different approach is required, one that strengthens Europe?s strongest regions but develops new approaches to promote opportunity in industrial declining and less-developed regions. There is ample new theory and evidence to support such an approach, which we have labelled 'place-sensitive distributed development policy'.

Keywords: Regions; inequality; economic divergence; place-sensitive development; European Union (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R11 R12 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-04, Revised 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-sbm and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (68)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg1817.pdf Version April 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Regional inequality in Europe: evidence, theory and policy implications (2019)
Working Paper: Regional inequality in Europe: evidence, theory and policy implications (2019)
Working Paper: Regional inequality in Europe: evidence, theory and policy implications (2018)
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:egu:wpaper:1817

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).