Independent and high-quality evaluations of government policies are an important input for designing evidence-based policy. Lack of incentives and institutions to write such evaluations, on the other hand, carry the risk of turning the system into a costly beauty contest. We study one of the...

This chapter discusses factors that contributed to different economic dynamics across European regions and the prevailing disparities. The impact of EU Cohesion Policy in reducing disparities is studied based on the empirical evidence on the effects of EU regional policy. With more than thirty...

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...

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...

In this paper, we examine the macro-to-micro-transition of cluster externalities to firms and how it is affected by the macroeconomic instability caused by the recessionary shock of 2008/2009. Using data from 16,166 manufacturing and business services firms nested in 390 German regions, we...

This chapter examines the distributional effects of place-based policies in the EU. In a first step, it characterizes existing income inequalities in the EU and distinguishes between their interregional and intraregional dimensions. A key result is that inequalities within European regions make...

Recent papers show that the impact of Cohesion Policy is not uniform in space but larger, smaller or insignificant depending on the regions. These outcomes mostly depend on the characteristics of each territory (conditioning factors). This paper reviews them and investigates, through descriptive...