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In the coming years, the share of the working-age population in the total population will start to decline in all countries of the European Union. All other things remaining equal, this so-called demographic burden will have a downward effect on economic growth. This paper examines whether the Europe 2020 employment targets would be sufficient to compensate for the downward impact of demographic burden and whether the impact of demography on economic growth differs between EU countries and between urban and rural regions. The results show that raising employment rates to the Europe 2020 targets can restore positive opportunities for economic growth, but not in all countries and only to a limited extent. They also show that even though urban and rural regions differ in terms of population growth and growth of the working age population, the prospects for demographic burden are highly similar for both types of regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a supportive argument for Ron Boschma regarding the implications of the European Monetary Union (EMU) for regional development. Significant regime change in economic policy; Arithmetic scope of regional divergence; Importance of the regional level as a policy factor in EMU.

The analysis of the location patterns of economic activities in both Europe and the US has been addressed in an extensive literature dependent on increasingly more sophisticated techniques that arguably reframe debate away from the policy questions in focus and towards debate on the complex empirical techniques that seem to be in vogue at any given time. In part this has been a response to some clear shortcomings in the use of simple locational Gini coefficients. It is argued herein that simple index approaches can still retain value if augmented with intuitive reading of some relevant maps. An example of the utility of this approach is provided in relation to the location patterns of four exemplar manufacturing industries in the EU and USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]