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...

This paper sets out to advance further in the development of a methodology for mapping, classifying and characterizing Local Production Systems (LPS) in Brazil. Such effort is justified not only for the importance these systems have been amassing for generating jobs and social welfare, economic...

Over the last decades, the Portuguese economy exhibited an outstanding growth performance. This period of fast economic growth allowed the country to consistently reduce its income gap with respect to the EU average. In spite of this, regions in Portugal exhibited large differences between each...

Regional politicians regard the cluster concept as a key factor for promoting regional economic performance. They refer to a comprehensive set of theoretical and empirical literature which provides the clusters' positive impact on regional development. Recent studies dealing with that topic...

Before 1990, the services of general interest (SeGI) in Romania were entirely provided by the public authorities. Afterwards, the market was gradually liberalized and the SeGI captured the attention of private operators. Nowadays, the business sector is involved next to the public authorities in...

Since ICT factors got growing importance in shaping social and economic differences, the determination of competitiveness in the information economy and society became needful in understanding modern regional disparities of Hungary. To evaluate recent inequalities caused by the factors of...

Tourism sector is playing an important role in the development of a region, contributing to the economy growth and job creation. Despite of the actual crisis, Tourism activities continues to growth in the last year (UNWTO 2011). Also, Spain maintains in the better positions of the world ranking....

A review of the types of Innovation System identified in the literature points to different models. Besides the very well-known National, Regional, Local, sectorial, and technological innovation systems, combinations of the previous can be identified, proposing sub-models such as National Open...

In this article, we quantitatively analyze changes in the size distribution of municipal jurisdictions in Japan by using their rank-size distribution to capture the change. In Japan, the central government sometimes enacts large-scale municipal mergers, aimed at the creating of municipalities of...

The economic crisis has affected the EU regions very differently over the last five years, depending on the region's strengths or weaknesses, its sectoral structure and the response of national and regional governments. In some countries, downturns can lead to narrower interregional disparities,...