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 rising attention of politicians as well as scientists in the EU to the large urban agglomerations as centres of economic growth is accompanied by political efforts to identify and to demarcate such agglomerations under the label ‘metropolitan regions’. This study develops a theoretical...

The article examines the capacity of four medium-sized cities in Southern Europe, concerning the current situation of their assets (agglomeration economies, urban infrastructures, factors of labor and cost, etc.), the degree of development policies implementation and effectiveness by local...

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...

I study place based policies under local political economy constraints, asking whether transfers across regions can foster regional convergence. I show that, if local workers can vote over the within-region allocation of the transfers, these may be spent unproductively and be ineffective in...

Urban systems, and regions more generally, are the epicenters of many of today's social issues. Yet they are also the global drivers of technological innovation and thus it is critical that we understand their vulnerabilities and what makes them resilient to different types of shocks. We take...

Resilience is attracting increasing interest in the thinking and policy discourses around regional development. However, regional development policy remains dominated by a narrow discourse of competitiveness that appears to have negative implications for resilience and is subject to increasing...

The paper illustrates the effect of a permanent demand-side shock in the perturbed regions and the associated spillover effects in the non-perturbed regions using the RHOMOLO spatial-numerical general equilibrium model of the EU economy. We test to what extent gradual upward pressure on wages...

Regional policy has been on the agenda of Turkey since the First Five-Year Development Plan (1963−1967), and so far, Turkey has put into practice to overcome regional disparities, one of the most important is regional-sectoral incentives. Thus, the incentive system, which has undergone many...

Large and sustained differences in economic performance across regions of developing countries have long provided motivation for fiscal incentives designed to encourage firm entry in lagging areas. But empirical evidence in support of these policies has been weak at best. The authors undertake a...