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...

Innovation performance seems to rely on efficiently integrating and extending different pieces of various types of knowledge emerging from diverse external sources. Different research traditions have stressed both formal (FSK) and informal sources of knowledge (ISK) as innovation performance...

There is a large consensus among social researchers on the positive role played by human capital on economic performances. The standard way to measure the human capital endowment is to consider the educational attainments by the resident population, usually the share of people with a university...

We study the effect of international trade and freeness of trade on interregional inequality within countries. We estimate a model derived from a structural economic geography approach where interregional inequality depends on weighted trade shares and trade costs and where we can derive an...

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 paper evaluates the impact of the EU Eastern enlargement 2004 on the economic performance of border regions located at the frontier to the new member states in the East. These regions were assumed to be particularly affected by the enlargement because of their geographic proximity to the new...

The paper analyses the national and regional European maritime clusters according to the sea basin division proposed by the European Union Integrated Maritime Policy: Atlantic and Arctic oceans; Baltic, Black, Mediterranean and North seas. Besides the identification of all maritime sectors by...

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...