We exploit the GEOSTAT 2011 population grid with a very high 1-km2 resolution to document that Spain presents the lowest density of settlements among European countries. We uncover that this anomaly cannot be accounted for by adverse geographic and climatic conditions. Using techniques from...

Health represents one of the thematic priorities for smart specialisation. Until now the difficulty in properly measuring research and innovation (R&I) in Health sector has represented a barrier to address specific policies in favour of less performing regions. This is due to two factors: a lack...

Innovation and entrepreneurship are key factors in current regional development initiatives, derived from the concepts of new economic growth theory. The aim of this paper is to combine an assessment of innovative and entrepreneurial performance with the spatial distribution and functional...

Regional development has been in the centre of interest among both academics but also decision makers in the central and local governments of many European countries. Identifying the key problems that regions face and considering how these findings could be effectively used as a basis for...

We document two novel stylized facts on European integration and cohesion. First, we show that the interregional income distribution, measured as GDP per capita at the NUTS-3 level, is bimodal for all considered years. Second, we demonstrate that this mixture of two log-normal distributions...

The current EU context does not serve the real needs of large parts of the European population at the local, regional, and national levels. The growing gap between the privileged segment of society on the one hand – with its access to high-quality education, advanced parts of the economy, new...

This paper analyses the uneven geography of the COVID-19 health impact in OECD and European countries. It first describes the increase in all-cause mortality – i.e. excess mortality – across subnational regions between January and December 2020. Subsequently, it investigates the regional...

Innovation performance seems to rely on efficiently integrating and extending different pieces of various types of knowledge emerging from diverse external sources. Different research traditions have stressed both formal (FSK) and informal sources of knowledge (ISK) as innovation performance...