With a budget of 308 billion euros, the EU structural funds are alongside agriculture (418 billion euros) the largest item of the EU budget. 12 percent of the funds, according to the Court of Accountability of the European Parliament end up in wrong channels, and in the international press...

In this paper we explore the impact of place-based innovation policy in Europe. We focus on the effects of Smart Specialisation strategies on the labour productivity of regional economies. We design an analytical framework that takes into account the entrepreneurial discovery process through...

This paper shows that regional policies can decrease populist support. We focus on the "development objective" (Objective-1) of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), meant to support lagging-behind regions. For causal inference, we exploit three sources of quasi-exogenous variation in a...

Circular Economy (CE) aspects are becoming increasingly relevant for a sustainable transition and regional development. Still, a methodology to assess regional performance and interregional differences is exclaimed to be missing at least in the European context. This gap makes it difficult to...

The EU's cohesion policy should now be confluent with the goals of the Lisbon strategy by promoting growth and employment. In this context, the promotion of a concept called regional innovation system has recently become important in the EU for guaranteeing long-term regional economic growth....

Croatia is geographically, historically and culturally a part of the European territory. Regions, as specific units within a national territory, are defined differently on EU level than in Croatia, where counties are far too small to be considered as regions in EU terms. The implementation of...

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...

Empirical analyses highlight local structural features (territorial capital) as constraints on regional growth and interregional convergence processes, but scant attention is devoted to traditional localised resources and specifically the natural and cultural heritage. However, only the...

Die intelligenten Spezialisierungsstrategien (RIS3) der EU sollen dazu dienen, wirtschaftliche Stärken von Regionen auszubauen, ihre Innovationsbasis zu stärken und Zukunftsbranchen zu entwickeln. Um regionale Disparitäten auszugleichen, kann diese Strategie aber nur eines von vielen...

The EU’s cohesion policy should now be confluent with the goals of the Lisbon strategy by promoting growth and employment. In this context, the promotion of a concept called regional innovation system has recently become important in the EU for guaranteeing long-term regional economic growth....