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...

This paper looks at the Cohesion Policy of the European Union (EU) and investigates how the EU agricultural and rural development policies shape its influence on regional growth. The analysis of the drivers of regional growth shows that the EU Regional Policy has a positive and significant...

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...

Die Corona-Pandemie hat die Wirtschaft in den letzten zwei Jahren vor große Herausforderungen gestellt. Personennahe Dienstleistungen waren ebenso betroffen wie die Industrie. Das IW-Regionalranking 2022 zeigt die regionalen Auswirkungen der CoronaPandemie hinsichtlich des Wohlstands, der...

This paper constructs a Regional Entrepreneurship and Development Index (REDI) that captures the contextual features of entrepreneurship across regions. Using both institutional data and survey data weaknesses in the incentive structure that affects regional development can be identified. The...

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 additionality principle says that the funds of the European Union should not replace, but be an addition to national regional policy funds. The benchmark for the co-funding is that the EU bears 50% of total costs associated with regional projects eligible for EU support. In some regions,...

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...

Südniedersachsen steht regionalökonomisch vor großen Herausforderungen. Um diesen zu begegnen, hat es eine strategiegeleitete Entwicklung hin zu einer stärker koordinierten Regional- und Innovationsförderung umgesetzt. Die Analyse dieses Prozesses leitet Thesen für innovations- und...

This working paper offers a synthesis of the current knowledge on the determinants of productivity. It carefully reviews both “spatial” (e.g. agglomerations, infrastructure, geography) and “aspatial” (e.g. human capital, labour regulations, industry-level innovation and dynamism)...