We analyze the first data set on consistently defined functional urban areas in Europe and compare the European to the US urban system. City sizes in Europe do not follow a power law: the largest cities are "too small" to follow Zipf's law.

Truck operations have recently become an important focus of academic research not only because road freight transport is a key part of logistics, but because trucks are usually associated with negative externalities including pollution, congestion and traffic accidents. While the negative...

The access to Services of General Interest (SGI) is a highly relevant factor for territorial cohesion and in creating economic opportunity. Although the topic of SGI was not on the top of the policy agenda during the last decade, it attracts far more interest since the start of the economic...

This paper investigates the main determinants of economic growth in the European Union from a regional perspective. The analysis is based on a recently available dataset from the European Cluster Observatory covering 253 European regions over the period 2002-2008. In addition to the traditional...

The European Youth Capital is an annual title awarded to a European city by the European Youth Forum, aiming to strength the relationship between the municipalities and the European Union institutions, with a particular focus on youth participation. Until now, little is known about the impacts...

In the past years, a large number of evaluations have assessed the impact of European Union's Cohesion Policy, the largest transnational programme for regional development promotion worldwide. In particular, great attention has been devoted to determine the effectiveness of EU funds in improving...

This paper presents a critical analysis of the SSG and a simulation of its effects for Brazilian sugar exports to countries such as the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) bloc. A first stage involved the identification of tariff lines (TL) for the EU and the US sugar imports from...

Most of the aggregate level analyses on the relationship between objective and subjective measures for well-being have limited themselves to measures of national GDP and mean life satisfaction. We develop this line of research by embedding the analysis into the context of 289 NUTS regions in...

The article deals with the problem of West European and Nordic countries small economies as well as ultra-small autonomous territories of Alands and Faeroes island's development. The latter are considered as the <<competitive sub-peripheries> areas due to the special industrial organization development, stimulated by the...</<competitive>

This paper reconsiders the theoretical foundations of EU regional policy in economics. It begins with a discussion of the line of thought of its prevalent explanation in equilibrium economics which is focusing on market failures as its key underpinning and which is the major toolkit of...