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Against the backdrop of the current political developments in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, such as Ukraine, Poland, and Romania, the question arises as to the role played by economic transformation and the resulting innovation linkages in these countries over the last 20 years. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of economic and institutional dimensions on the development of CEE countries, explicitly distinguishing between European Union (EU) members and non‐members, and thus reflecting the differences in institutions and path dependency. Furthermore, the paper contrasts the performance of CEE countries with that of Western European countries. To achieve these objectives, the impact of factors such as innovation, institutions, and political practices on the economic development of 37 European countries from 2000 until 2020 is followed using fixed effects regression and Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. The results of the analysis show the importance of institutional factors such as low levels of corruption, political freedoms, and intellectual property. The effect of institutional variables was particularly pronounced in the case of non‐EU countries, which indicates the particular importance of the development of stable institutions for achieving higher levels of economic development for this category of countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is mounting theoretical and empirical research that explains the reasons for the rapid expansion of China's export trade, but they mostly ignore the effects of cultural differences. To fill this gap, this paper provides an empirical investigation of how cultural diversity affects the sustainable development of trade, which is defined as the goal of maintaining certain volume of trade and making trade growth sustainable. The findings are as follows. (1) Cultural diversity can significantly promote the sustainable development of trade. (2) Entrepreneurship is the possible channel wherein cultural diversity affects the sustainable development of trade, including innovation entrepreneurship and business entrepreneurship. (3) Further studies demonstrate that economic openness has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between cultural diversity and the sustainable development of trade. That is, the higher the level of openness of a city, the stronger the promotion of cultural diversity to the sustainable development of trade. This study not only deepens understanding on the relationship between culture and trade but also provides important policy implications for many countries that have high migration rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human agency has become a core topic in economic geography complementing traditional, structural approaches to explain regional development. This paper contributes firstly with a discussion of the theoretical and conceptual relationships between the agency of individuals, organizations, and systems. Secondly, it proposes a novel analytical framework for studying how human agency, combined with external changes affects regional economic development, and how regional structural preconditions and external changes explain the activation of change agency. Thirdly, the relevance of the framework is examined through comparative studies of about 20 years of industrial development in three Norwegian regions. This illuminates the importance of human agency in regional transformation processes, how regional preconditions influence but not determine the activation of change agency, as well as why and how regional policy plays a role in the emergence of change agency. Yet, future research needs to investigate the context conditions, which promote or hinder the activation of change agency, to trace change in economic activities over time and link it to causal mechanisms, and to pay attention to the unintended consequences of change agency in the longer‐term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the perspective of the institutional environment, this study explores the reasons and mechanisms behind the widening of the economic disparity between China's North and South during the economic development transformation from a factor expansion model to an innovation‐driven model. By defining the institutional environment in terms of the government–market relationship and the non‐state‐owned economy development, the theoretical analysis shows that compared with the South, the government intervenes more in the market and the proportion of state‐owned economy is higher in the North. The differences in the institutional environment are an important reason for the widening of the North–South economic disparity in China during the transformation of China's development model. Taking this transformation after the 2008 international financial crisis as a quasi‐natural experiment, this study constructs a difference‐in‐difference model for empirical testing based on the differences in the regional impact of the economic development model transformation on different institutional environments. It was found that after the economic development model entered the innovation‐driven stage, those regions with a better institutional environment significantly promoted their economic growth. Further mechanism tests have found that innovation capability is an important mechanism for the institutional environment that affects the North–South economic disparity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the spatiotemporal evolution and effects of regional functions in rural China and summarizes the spatiotemporal characteristics of rural Chinese regional functions from 2005 to 2015. The results of this study are as follows. (a) The values of the regional functions of rural China generally exhibit a "V‐shaped" distribution such that these values are high in eastern and western China and low in central China, and are high in northern China and low in southern China. (b) The overall functions of rural Chinese regions vary distinctly by region across northeastern China, eastern China, central China, and western China. (c) The spatial variation of regional production function values in rural China also exhibits a gradually declining trend, with the highest values in eastern China, followed by northeastern, central, and western China. This pattern exhibits a relatively strong coupling relationship with the spatial variation principles governing China's natural environment, resource carrying capacity, and economic development level. Overall, regional ecological function values do not exhibit any significant variation, but they do exhibit a gradually declining trend, starting from western and northern China and moving to eastern and southern China. (d) The degree of spatial spillover received by a given region from a neighboring region's production, living, or ecological function is stronger than the effect of the error shock from the corresponding function of the neighboring region. The effects of influencing factors on different regions exhibit significant variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the mechanism of rural economic restructuring is the basis for promoting the optimal restructuring of the rural economy and society as well as for reviving the countryside. We conducted a case study of Gongyi, a typical region experiencing rapid industrialization in inland China and systematically reviewed its economic restructuring process over the past 40 years after China's reform and opening‐up. On the basis of identifying spatial interfaces in Gongyi, we analyzed the influence of these spatial interfaces on the rural economic restructuring in Gongyi using geodetectors. The study showed that the influence of different types of interfaces has had a temporal evolutionary effect, the influence of a single human interface was higher than that of a natural interface. With the different stages of economic development, the influence of the interface is also differentiated. The influence of multiple interfaces increased after superposition, and the superposition of different types of interfaces constituted different patterns of rural economic restructuring in Gongyi. Overall, the influence of physical spatial interfaces on rural economic restructuring has decreased. Therefore, greater attention should be paid to the influence of abstract spatial interfaces in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]