Regional inequality has increased in Sweden over the past decades, albeit from a low level. While redistribution and other public policies can narrow regional gaps in income, well-being and access to services, productivity growth is key to maintaining economic dynamism, creating job...

What characterizes regions where right-wing populist parties are relatively successful? A prominent hypothesis proposed in recent literature claims that places that are "left behind" or "do not matter" are a breeding ground for the rise of populism. We re-examine this hypothesis by analyzing the...

This article aims to study the regional development of renewable energies (RE) in France over the period 1990-2015. As a first step, Principal Component Analysis was used on the collected data, which led to a classification of RE's development into four sub-periods. The first two sub-periods...

Empirical evidence about income convergence among regions and countries is inconclusive and it is necessary to clarify the economic and institutional conditions for convergence. We investigate movements in the income distribution among regions in an integrated market with high mobility of labor,...

This paper presents new evidence on the last concluded wave (2007-2013) of the EU cohesion policy. We depart from the broadly used GDP-growth approach and evaluate the impact of EU Structural Funds (SFs) on a battery of regional well-being indicators including economic, educational, health, and...

Following this introductory chapter which comprises Part I of the book, there are eleven chapters and each of these chapters—written by an expert or by a team of experts — discusses a particular research question or questions about rural-urban dichotomies and spatial development in Asia. For...

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...

Finding a definitive answer to the question of whether fiscal redistribution is harmful or beneficial for regional economic performance is not straightforward. This paper disentangles the key components of fiscal redistribution in a regional Canada-US setting. Redistributive spending is...

This paper proposes a methodology which combines elements of parametric regression analysis with the nonparametric distribution dynamics approach in order to analyse the role of some variables in the convergence of productivity across European regions over the period 1980-2002. We find that the...

We discuss regional disparities in economic performance and living standards. We first set out some key facts, and provide a conceptual framework to help analyze whether such disparities are efficient, or instead reflect market and/or policy failures. We examine whether policy attempts to reduce...