The recent enlargement of the European Union (EU) will lead to unprecedented reforms of regional policies. We examine the regional distribution of gross value added, employment, and productivity for the Polish, Hungarian, and Czech regions, and compare them to the EU-15 average for the 1990-2000...

As the European Union will soon enlarge to ten new members, the question of the future of European policies, in particular the regional policies, remains problematic. The differences in labour productivity between the current applicants are obvious, but these differences are also present between...

Economic processes are often characterized by spatial autocorrelation: the coincidence of value similarity to locational similarity. As a consequence of spatial autocorrelation, analysts observe spatial regional clusters. Recent advances in the areas of spatial statistics/econometrics offer...

Le Gallo J. and Kamarianakis Y. The evolution of regional productivity disparities in the European Union from 1975 to 2002: a combination of shift-share and spatial econometrics, Regional Studies. This paper evaluates the relative significance of the key factors that underlie regional...

The aim of this paper is to assess the evolution of regional productivity disparities in the European Union. Using a sample of 205 regions and 8 sectors on the 1975-2000 period, we use Esteban’s shift- share analysis to investigate the extent to which the existing interregional inequalities in...

Numerous studies have pointed to the econometric problems introduced by heterogeneity in cross-sectional data samples used to explore convergence suggested by neo-classical growth models. We introduce a local concept of convergence along with a Bayesian locally linear spatial estimation method...

Measurement error in an independent variable is one reason why OLS estimates may not be consistent. However, as shown by Dagenais (1994), in some circumstances the OLS bias may be ameliorated somewhat given the presence of serially correlated disturbances, and OLS may prove superior to standard...