In the last years, and particularly since the publication of the famous Barca Report (Barca, 2009), the European Union (EU) is starting to acknowledge the importance of spatially targeted regional policies and to understand how crucial a territorial approach can be in order to achieve desirable...

Innovation and entrepreneurship are key factors in current regional development initiatives, derived from the concepts of new economic growth theory. The aim of this paper is to combine an assessment of innovative and entrepreneurial performance with the spatial distribution and functional...

By applying the smile curve concept to regional value added growth rather than to levels, the paper claims that local value-added growth increases when a region is specialised in scarce natural resources or scarce human skills within a GVC. Under these circumstances, in fact, the region can...

In this study, we test whether regional growth in 11 European countries depends on financial development and suggest the use of cost- and profit-efficiency estimates as quality measures for financial institutions. Contrary to the usual quantitative proxies for financial development, the quality...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of domestic and international tourism on the economic growth process for 179 regions in ten European countries, which are highly representative of total tourism flows. The econometric analysis is performed for the period 1999-2009 and is based on a...