This article considers the relationship between centralised, exogenous institutions and the embedded, endogenous institutions of rural governance in Europe through an examination of the evaluation procedures of the European LEADER programme. LEADER is presented in the literature as progressive...

The additionality principle says that the funds of the European Union should not replace, but be an addition to national regional policy funds. The benchmark for the co-funding is that the EU bears 50% of total costs associated with regional projects eligible for EU support. In some regions,...

The term "competitiveness" has been used in conceptually distinct ways at the firm, regional and national levels. After primarily reviewing existing concepts at the national level, we introduce a new definition of regional competitiveness adapting definitions used in the academic literature....

Enhancing competitiveness is a popular target in economic policy making - not only at the national, but at the regional level as well despite neither generally accepted definition nor any strong agreement on how to measure it. In this chapter we discuss the conceptual underpinnings of why it is...

This paper focuses on the climate change challenge faced by Central & Eastern European countries both those inside the European Union and those outside it. They have enormous energy intensity and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, mainly from energy production, which is oil, and worse,...

We analyze unconditional within-country convergence from 1991 to 2009 in 21 European countries. Unlike most previous studies we focus on the heterogeneity of convergence. We find that convergence processes in currency unions are extremely heterogenous, highly discontinuous and strongly...

The experiences of 259 regions in 21 European countries with within country GDP per capita and labour productivity growth suggest that variables associated with pro-active, growth oriented strategies are consistently more important predictors of successful regional development than variables...

A major objective of this study is to analyse the evolutionary patterns of regional linkages and disparities across the EU space, especially those related to rural and peripheral/remote regions. In particular, this report assesses the economy-wide effects, in terms of GDP and employment,...

Rural areas still play a major role within the EU, as Europe is still a fairly rural continent. Moreover, EU rural areas are going through greater challenges and major transformations. After the Eastern enlargements of the EU (in 2004 and 2007), they are getting more and more heterogeneous, in...