More than one third of the European Union's total budget is spent on socalled Cohesion Policy via the structural funds. Its main purpose is to promote the development of the EU and to support convergence between the levels of development of the various European regions. Investigating the impact...

Social trust is increasingly seen as an important determinant of economic growth and social prosperity in regions and nations. Even in a comparatively homogeneous area such as Europe, there are stark sub-national differences in levels of generalized trust. It is thus of crucial importance to...

Using data from the OECD Regional Well-Being Index - a set of quality-of-life indicators measured at the sub-national level, we construct a set of composite well-being indices. We analyse the extent to which the choice of five alternative aggregation methods affects the well-being ranking of...

The ongoing European crisis has revealed many deficiencies in the existing European institutional architecture. One of the crucial deficiencies is the unsustainable European regional disparity between the most developed European regions and those regions that are falling behind — a gap that is...

This article analyzes the role of different elements of social capital in economic growth for a sample of 85 European regions during the period 1995-2008. Much has been said about social capital in the last two decades, but studies for the European regional context are scant, and those analyzing...

This paper examines the effects of state borders on the performance of metropolitan areas in Europe. A multi-dimensional conceptualization of border effects is elaborated and empirically tested with the help of statistical modelling. The results suggest that Swiss cases and metropolitan areas...

Even if Romania succeeded to become a member of the European Union, the development gaps between its regions and those in the other member states continue to be significant. The paper will focus on analyzing the regional disparities in Romania, in terms of GDP/capita, FDI and possibly state...

The aim of this study is to analyse the development of new industrial specialisations and the process of export diversification both at the country and the regional level for the EU countries over time. It examines to what extent these processes show path dependent properties, whether persistent...

A reasonable future for Europe can only be achieved if two essential elements are fulfilled: Firstly, newly established institutions must be democratic and have strong support from citizens rather than from national governments. Secondly, the large number of different ethnic, cultural,...

We exploit the GEOSTAT 2011 population grid with a very high 1-km2 resolution to document that Spain presents the lowest density of settlements among European countries. We uncover that this anomaly cannot be accounted for by adverse geographic and climatic conditions. Using techniques from...