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This paper explores the implementation of grand spatial planning narratives such as the compact city and polycentricity in planning practice. The effects of overlapping scales on the application of spatial imaginaries in metropolitan space are examined. Using post‐socialist space, the research enriches the geographical context of metropolitan studies. On the basis of a spatial analysis of metropolitan form and centrality and a textual analysis of the relevant spatial plans of three Czech metropolitan areas, the key features in efforts of planning polycentric and compact metropolitan areas are identified as "Administrative blindness", "(De)centralization ambiguity", and "Reactive passivity". By identifying the limits of translating spatial visions into the practical language of statutory regional and land‐use plans, the paper contributes to the debate on the effectiveness of metropolitan planning based on the specific context of Central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at investigating the impact of the Great Recession on per capita GDP convergence process across European regions and countries. Using the time‐varying factor model developed by Phillips and Sul for the period 2000–2015 and two different merging procedures to identify clubs, we provide evidence of the diverging impact of the Great Recession "between" the higher and the lower convergence clubs at both regional and country levels as well as of the strengthening of the convergence process "within" most clubs. In addition, we add further evidence to the common belief of a "multi‐speed" Europe by contrasting Eastern European countries' and regions' behavior vis‐à‐vis original European members' one, and by identifying the factors that affect club membership and resilience to the recent economic downturn. We find that the membership in the higher clubs and resilience to the Great Recession are positively affected by the presence of several local‐specific factors and macroeconomic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the particular role of the national setting for the economic resilience of regions during the resistance and recovery phase. Our empirical set‐up introduces a spatial hierarchy of 249 NUTS‐2 regions nested in 22 European countries while it includes numerous recessionary shocks from 1990 to 2014. Our results suggest that the impact of the national setting is strongest during the resistance phase when the national level accounts for up to 44.9% of the variance in regional GDP development. During recovery, however, the national share decreases but still amounts to no less than 22.0%. Apart from the direct effects that originate from, for example, regulatory density and fiscal policy measures, the national impact takes the form of cross‐level moderation effects. These indirect effects indicate that the regional patterns of resilience are additionally shaped by the inter‐linkages of country‐specific institutional factors and regional determinants. Taking all this into account, regional economic resilience is anything but just a matter of regional capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how spinoffs in peripheral regions can profit from the work experience of their founders. More specifically, it discusses which firm routines and business contacts entrepreneurs gather through their prior work experience, and how this experience influences the organizational structure and orientation of the newly founded firm. The transfer of capabilities from parent firm to spinoff has been identified as important aspect of industrial clustering, but empirical evidence from peripheral areas is still sparse. It compares 22 semi-structured interviews with founders of manufacturing firms from different peripheral regions in Switzerland to investigate whether routine and network transfer differs in varying peripheral contexts. The results show that not only inherited routines are important, but also inherited business contacts. Further, instead of simply reproducing acquired routines and networks, founders employ a mixture of continuity and change to find a good trade-off between relying on well-proven practices and introducing novelty. Finally, the geographical proximity of inherited business contacts seems to have an influence on the implementation strategy founders choose. Entrepreneurs with strong inherited local business contacts do not have to invest as much in building up new business contacts as those entrepreneurs in more isolated locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automotive industry has long had a reputation for organising its production networks on a macro-regional scale. However, over the 2000-2012 time span, extended vertical disintegration of both carmakers and mega-suppliers, and the 2008-2009 trade collapse suggest that this geographical organisation pattern could have weakened, giving way to a genuine globalisation of auto-parts trade. This paper first reviews arguments likely to explain why automotive production networks are multi-scalar, ranging from local to global. Empirical analysis of international auto-parts trade data from Germany, France, UK, and Spain suggests that there has been little progression in globalisation of production networks. General data features can be best explained as follows: 1) the auto-parts import level of a given country is mainly driven by its automobile production level, and by the degree of presence of foreign headquartered carmakers; and 2) the breakdown of imports into procurement flows from near-distant and far-distant countries is mainly driven by the degree of presence of carmakers headquartered in far-distant countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present debate on regional policy design to fit the Europe 2020 Agenda calls for additional reflections on the way sectoral policies, like innovation policies, can be translated appropriately into a regional setting. The paper enters the debate on smart specialization strategies by stressing the need to overcome the simplistic dichotomy between core and periphery in the Union and between an advanced 'research area' (the core) and a 'co-application area' of general purpose technologies to local technological specificities (the periphery). The geography of innovation is much more complex than a simple core-periphery model, and the logical pathway toward innovation is much more complex than the linear model of research and development-invention-innovation direct link: the innovation patterns are differentiated among regions according to their regional context conditions. The identification of specific 'innovation patterns' is necessary to design 'smart innovation' policies. The paper presents a critique to the smart specialization debate, suggests a new taxonomy of European innovative regions based on their innovation patterns, and proposes innovation policies for each regional mode of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the notion of territorial patterns of innovation as a new conceptualization to understand the relationship among knowledge, innovation, and economic growth at the regional level. The territorial patterns of innovation approach reject the simplistic view of an invention-innovation equivalence and advance alternative patterns, alternative ways in which knowledge and innovation can take place and mix in space. Each of them represents a different way of innovating, one not necessarily more efficient than the other. On the empirical ground, the paper demonstrates this statement for all NUTS2 regions of the 27 European Union states by showing that the efficiency in taking advantage of innovation does not only link to the strength of the local knowledge base; rather, territorial patterns of innovation characterized by relatively low knowledge intensity can be relatively more efficient in grasping and exploiting innovation returns for growing. Interesting policy implications can be drawn from the empirical analysis presented. If the results do not deny the importance of research and development ( R&D) activities for regional growth, and therefore the right focus put forward by the Europe 2020 on a 'smart growth' based on knowledge and innovation, they call for particular attention when the Europe 2020 goal is translated into a regional setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the endogenous development ( ED) approach has gained influence within the rhetoric of European rural development policies ( RP). This paper provides a fundamental critique of the approach and shows that neither the economic elements of RP in general nor ED in particular are targeted towards the specific economic needs and capabilities of rural areas. The second part of this paper consists of the search for possible alternative concepts for a more targeted and effective RP. Based on a synopsis of existing theories, an integrated approach is proposed that builds upon the different coordination mechanisms for economic activity suggested by different theories. The new, integrated perspective enables an economic characterisation of rural areas and indicates that the successful support of local coordination of economic activity is determined by specific local conditions. It also makes evident that localised approaches usually cannot compensate rural areas for the lack of agglomeration advantages. Therefore, programmes for the economic development of rural areas which support the local coordination of economic activity remain a second-best policy. As such, they do not free the state from policies of spatial redistribution if the political aim is the creation of comparable living conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon the companion paper in this issue, this essay analyses five case studies that can be taken as prototypes of the system-wide cultural district culture-led developmental model. The research targets five cities in Europe and the U.S.: Valencia, Austin, Newcastle/ Gateshead, Linz, and Denver. Each presents specific characteristics but also some deep, structural common traits. The case studies are compared and their future viability is evaluated in terms of the factors presented in the companion piece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we aim to assess the role played by inventors' cross-regional mobility and collaborations in fostering knowledge diffusion across regions and subsequent innovation. Second, we intend to evaluate the feasibility of using mobility and co-patenting information to build cross-regional interaction matrices to be used within the spatial econometrics toolbox. To do so, we depart from a knowledge production function where regional innovation intensity is a function not only of the own regional innovation inputs but also external accessible knowledge stocks gained through interregional interactions. Differently from much of the previous literature, cross-section gravity models of mobility and co-patents are estimated to use the fitted values to build our 'spatial' weights matrices, which characterize the intensity of knowledge interactions across a panel of 269 regions covering most European countries over 6 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of the literature on fiscal decentralization has tended to stress that the greater capacity of decentralized governments to tailor policies to local preferences and to be innovative in the provision of policies and public services, the greater the potential for economic efficiency and growth. There is, however, little empirical evidence to substantiate this claim. In this paper we examine, using a panel data approach with dynamic effects, the relationship between the level of fiscal decentralization and economic growth rates across 16 Central and Eastern European countries over the 1990–2004 period. Our findings suggest that, contrary to the majority view, there is a significant negative relationship between two out of three fiscal decentralization indicators included in the analysis and economic growth. However, the use of different time lags allows us to nuance this negative view and show that long-term effects vary depending on the type of decentralization undertaken in each of the countries considered. While expenditure at and transfers to sub-national tiers of government are negatively correlated with economic growth, taxes assigned at the sub-national level evolve from having a significantly negative to a significantly positive correlation with the national growth rate. This supports the view that sub-national governments with their own revenue source respond better to local demands and promote greater economic efficiency [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the neighboring effects of Internet adoption as measured by the percentage of firms with their own website in the European regions. This is the first study that explicitly analyzes the role played by spatial effects to explain website adoption for the European case. A set of instruments and techniques commonly used in the spatial econometrics framework is employed to test the hypothesis that proximity matters when explaining Internet adoption by firms. Results show that firms in physically adjacent regions register a similar degree of Internet adoption, confirming the presence in this context of positive spatial dependence. Nevertheless, the spatial effects detected are mainly constrained by national borders. Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, population density, sectoral composition, and education are positively related to geographic distribution of Internet adoption in the enlarged European Union. In addition, regional disparities in Internet adoption were found to be less important than territorial inequalities in GDP per capita. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has highlighted that in the last few years, the evolution of regional disparities in many European states has become pro-cyclical. This represents a change with respect to the predominantly anti-cyclical pattern of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper addresses the question of whether and when this change has taken place in the southern periphery of Europe, before analysing the factors that may have played a role in such a change. The analysis relies on a regional database that includes the evolution of the GDP per capita of NUTS II regions in five European countries (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) between 1980 and 2000. The results of the analysis support the hypothesis of a change towards a pro-cyclical evolution of regional disparities in the cases of Italy, Portugal, and Spain, but not in those of Greece and France. A relationship between these pro-cyclical patterns and the emergence of less dynamic sheltered economies is also detected in peripheral regions. This lack of dynamism is related to the fact that numerous peripheral areas in southern Europe have become increasingly dependent on factors such as transfers or public investment and employment, and therefore are less exposed to changes in market conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Producer services have been among the most rapidly growing industries, as measured by employment, in the United States and in Europe in recent decades. The production and delivery of these specialized forms of service industry work require the use of transportation and communications systems in a variety of ways, including the physical movement of people working in these industries, as well as the movement of the information related to the production and distribution of their work. Some of this work is performed in localized markets, requiring travel between clients and suppliers in local transportation modes, such as auto, bus, or other types of transportation. Other work is done by specialists who travel interregionally and globally to do their work, primarily traveling to their clients. There is little knowledge of how these production relationships have changed with the advent of the Internet and the widespread use of e-mail in the business production process. Within the framework of this STELLA initiative, this paper outlines research needs in this area, and frames an approach that would produce badly needed knowledge about impacts on the producer services of the Internet and related e-commerce initiatives on physical transportation systems at a local to interregional scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]