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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 concept of Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) is one of the key policy instruments for Europe's regional development. The strategy considers the regional sectoral diversity to build a competitive advantage and increase the position in the knowledge economy. Particularly less-developed regions can benefit in this context when Smart Specialisation is promoted as the primary instrument of European Cohesion Policy. One strategy to develop the competitive advantage of moderate innovator regions is to develop a common, collaborative strategy to overcome regional disparities by leveraging regional growth potential. A methodology is presented by the authors, which is suggested to be accompanied for the identification of Smart Specialisation Strategies in an interregional context. The objective of this is to supply a novel method for interregional Smart Specialisation development and to improve its outward-looking orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the article, new observations on the gap between metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions are presented. The economic performance of a country mostly emanates from its metropolitan regions. As these regions profit from a highly dynamic routine, they are growing rapidly. From the outside, assumptions about the prosperity of a nation is often presumed to stay in steady proportion to the development of its economic lead. However, not only the gap between metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions is in no steady proportion, this difference also varies when observing capital city metropolitan regions and second-tier metropolitan regions, meaning metropolitan regions of a country other than the capital. The article concludes that differences between these categories are slightly shrinking, but the gaps are still enormous. Nevertheless, the dynamics of these gaps are largely overseen and the assumption that non-metropolitan regions of a country are developing in a fixed relation to metropolitan regions needs a closer investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This research analyses the impact of the creative sector on total employment and on the creative sector's employment growth in Western Germany's regions from 1977 to 2004. For the analysis, the definitions of the creative sector follow a technologically and culturally oriented definition and, alternatively, Florida's creative class (2002). These approaches are contrasted with a skill-based approach. Using a fixed-effects panel model with time lags, the results support the view that the creative sector fosters the regional growth rate of total employment. The results suggest, moreover, that an initially large share of regional creative professionals pushes the regional concentration of those professions in agglomerated regions further. The driving force behind the concentration of creative professionals is local amenities—measured by bohemians—and it is assumed that knowledge spillovers—possibly accelerated by diversity and close proximity—contribute to this polarization. These results are also confirmed for highly skilled agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to analyse the impact of the creative sector—technological employees and bohemians—on economic growth in Germany's planning regions. It is concluded that technological employees and bohemians foster growth. We find that growth is particularly dynamic in agglomerated and urbanized regions. Among regional factors relevant to the location decisions of creative professionals, diversity is analysed in particular, as it might stimulate growth because of its potential to increase the rate of interchange of different ideas and knowledge. The analysis of both—creative professionals and diversity—is related to two current topics in regional economics, namely the knowledge-based economy and its effects on city development, and the topic of creative cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides new evidence on barriers that hamper small and medium‐sized enterprises (SME) in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) to establish international collaboration. Our analysis makes use of collected data concerning internationalization of SMEs in seven BSR countries. Our logistic multivariate regression model, which we applied after selecting relevant variables using the LASSO method, indicates a significant positive effect for the entities´ demand in support to acquire clients as well as the absence of foreign markets operations. A significant adverse effect is found for cooperation agreements as a support tool for internationalization as well as the interest to participate in an innovation and internationalization system. SMEs rather desire their internationalization capacity building than direct support in acquiring clients. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that strengthening cross‐national collaborations and establishing appropriate support programs are important toward innovativeness and competitiveness among SMEs in the BSR. Smart Specialization Strategies (S3) could provide a framework for building cross‐national collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]