The abolition of the artificial impediments of cross-border interaction has produced a new EU regional socioeconomic map, releasing dynamics that have influenced significantly the EU socioeconomic space. Especially at the borderlands, a new mix of opportunities and threats has come forth,...

The European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), launched in 2004, is a unified EU policy framework towards the EU neighboring countries (ENP countries). The objective of the ENP is to strengthen the prosperity, stability and security of the (enlarged) EU and the ENP countries, creating a "ring of...

The fears of a sovereign debt crisis and the consequent lack of confidence, indicated by a widening of bond yield spreads and risk insurance of credit default swaps, have transformed a financial crisis to an economic crisis in Greece, affecting its productive bases and its income level. Up to...

Territorial cooperation, taken as collaboration “beyond national boundariesâ€, among administrative bodies and/or political actors, generally offers the ground for functional cooperation towards problem-solving and challenge-tackling, along with the exploitation of the local and...

The evaluation of regional inequalities and the monitoring of their evolution (regional convergence/divergence analysis) is an issue of extreme interest in the field of regional science as it demonstrates the role of market dynamics and appraises the effectiveness of regional policy. Extending...

The new European economic space is characterised by growing levels of economic integration among EU members and their neighbouring countries in the East. By and large, East-West integration implies increasing interaction across the external borders of the EU. This paper investigates the impact...

A plethora of past studies have concluded that unconditional "&bgr;"-convergence is present in a broad sample of regions, implying that poor regions grow faster than rich ones. All these econometric studies tend to overlook the relative importance or size of each region in the national setting,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate convergence or divergence trends at global scale. Design/methodology/approach – The paper questions the methodology and findings of the conventional convergence literature using linear OLS models. It introduces polynomial (quadratic)...