The literature on regional disparities in China is both broad and deep. Nonetheless much of its focus has been on the effects of trade liberalization and national policies toward investment in interior provinces. Few pieces have examined whether the disparities might simply be due to differences...

The paper aims to assess the evolution of the development disparities (output, employment, overall and by sectors) in the regions and counties of Romania. Using classic and spatial shift-share analysis tools, we investigate the extent to which the existing interregional and, especially,...

Development gaps are a common feature throughout the regions of the European Union, and Romania is no exception. Despite all the political and financial efforts, the convergence process is lengthy and complex, and the gaps with the deepest economic and social roots are the most difficult to be...

Given its unpredictable nature, urban sprawl in the Mediterranean region is considered an intriguing (and intricate) socioeconomic issue. Since the 1970s, urban dispersion advanced rapidly in southern Europe-irrespective of a city's size and morphology-with urbanization rates growing faster than...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on regional-national disparities in environmental efficiency, based on case studies of Italy and the Lazio region, which includes the city of Rome. Shift-share analyses provide evidence on the drivers of environmental efficiency and on sector...

Regions with large cities are driving growth in Bulgaria, while many rural regions suffer from depopulation and rapid ageing. Improving living standards across all regions will require better coverage and access to public services, notably in health and long-term care. Policy action to integrate...

The main objective of this work is to review the recent achievements on the mechanisms explaining local and rural development, which underpin the current definition of rural areas in the European literature. The analysis carried out in this article acknowledges a gap between local development...

The paper addresses the spatial structure of agriculture in Poland whose spatial development is analysed from the beginning of the transition towards a market economy up until the country's forthcoming accession to the EU and the correlated implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy (Cap)....

According to the hypothesis of our study there is a close relationship between the standard of economic development and the scale of internal spatial disparities. Central in our applied theory is that the first phase of capitalist economic development is characterised with an initially fast and...

In explaining the uneven spatial distribution of economic activity, urban economics and new economic geography (NEG) dominate recent research in economics. A main difference between these two approaches is that NEG stresses the role of spatial linkages whereas urban economics does not do so. We...