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The European Union Cohesion Policy lies on a variety of policy instruments including Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3) on a regional level. Despite its proximity to Europe, there is currently no strategy of its own for North Africa, only a strategy-building process. Since Smart Specialisation claims to address regional disparities by initiating catch-up processes and exploiting endogenous growth potential, the concept is particularly promising for less-developed regions. The authors present five steps to define priority sectors for the development of a Smart Specialisation strategy for the country of Tunisia, using the regions of Sfax and Medenine as an example. These steps involve regional qualitative and quantitative assessment, trend analysis and an analysis of sectoral internationalisation potential. The findings align with previous work and contribute to the discussion about Smart Specialisation on the African continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union member states face a new increase of inequality. Thereby, decreasing regional inequality among its regions is one of the central political aims of the European Union and is addressed in almost all European development strategies. It seems that the results of the strategies in terms of cohesion are ambiguous and certain targets have been missed. More dramatically, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the European countries differently. It is to be assumed that the disparities among European regions tend to increase again, not only between the different directions, but also between core and peripheral regions within countries. The article at hand aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion by showing that not only recent development trends indicate a dysfunctional convergence process but also the economic specialisation can become a significant disadvantage for certain regions considering current global megatrends that might lead to a conservation of existing disparity patterns. The article therefore arguments that European Structural Policy needs to recognise the shortcomings of the past and calls for a regional policy that focuses on endogenous growth potential in regions rather than financial transfer alone. Smart Specialisation could be an instrument to develop and push such endogenous growth potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]