Progress in regional convergence in the EU has been uneven over the last two decades. While Central and Eastern Europe has been catching up, Southern Europe has often lost ground, especially after the global financial crisis. Furthermore, within most countries, gaps between large cities and...

Regional inequality has increased in Sweden over the past decades, albeit from a low level. While redistribution and other public policies can narrow regional gaps in income, well-being and access to services, productivity growth is key to maintaining economic dynamism, creating job...

This working paper offers a synthesis of the current knowledge on the determinants of productivity. It carefully reviews both “spatial” (e.g. agglomerations, infrastructure, geography) and “aspatial” (e.g. human capital, labour regulations, industry-level innovation and dynamism)...

The aim of this paper is to provide a contribution to the debate on the effectiveness ;of cohesion policies in Italy. It focuses on the effects of EU spending on the convergence process across Italian regions from 1996 to 2007. The empirical analysis is based on a neoclassical growth model which...

Despite being one of the smallest countries in the OECD, Israel is marked by significant socio-economic disparities, which have a clear spatial dimension. Ethnic and religious groups with weak socio-economic outcomes are not benefitting from the thriving high-tech sector in the centre of the...

This working paper assesses opportunities and policies for green growth in the Chicago Tri-State Metropolitan Area. It first examines the Chicago metro-region's economic and environmental performance and potential constraints to regional growth, and identifies emerging regional specialisations...

Estonia and Finland have centuries of collaboration, mainly between the capital areas of Tallinn and Helsinki that currently account for 2 million inhabitants and USD 76 billion in economic output. The entry of Estonia into the European Union and, since the mid-2000s, a two-hour ferry trip, have...

Hedmark County (Norway) and Dalarna County (Sweden) are both rural, with the border being remote from regional centres. The total population of less than half a million inhabitants spans across almost 58 800 km², with an economic output of USD 22 billion. Efforts to support collaboration at the...

The Bothnian Arc is a cross-border area on the border of Finland and Sweden that covers the most populated areas along the upper Bothnian Bay, spanning 800 kilometres. It has a population of around 710 000, across 55 000 km² with an economic output of USD 31 billion. The Bothnian Arc...

Over the past three decades the field of regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling has flourished, growing from a handful of top-down, single-region and low-dimensioned multiregional models, to a mature field, in which output of large-scale general-purpose multiregional CGE models...