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Copyright of Papers in Regional Science is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The 2024 TESG Forum revisits Anssi Paasi's 2001 article Bounded Spaces in the Mobile World: Deconstructing 'Regional Identity'. This work expanded Paasi's ideas on the institutionalisation of regions by highlighting the interplay between the social construction of regions and the changing regional identities of individuals and communities in the context of Europeanisation. The article places Paasi's theoretical work on how regions emerge as bounded spaces in the whirlwind of a rapidly globalising world. In exploring the relation between regions and identity, Bounded Spaces in the Mobile World reveals tensions between fixity and mobility. Revisiting this important paper 20 years later makes us realise how the world around us has changed. The tension between mobility and fixity remains but in different imaginaries and power constellations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levelling up and the everyday economy are two crucial concepts for understanding the direction of policy making in the UK, but the relationship between them has not yet been fully explored. Moreover, the UK's industrial and regional policies are woefully underdeveloped. This article suggests how levelling up and the everyday economy concepts could contribute to Labour's emerging industrial and regional policies. It argues that Labour is right to pursue an economic growth agenda, but must make growth work for communities and workers, and the everyday economy can help. The everyday economy can contribute to, and benefit from, local productivity growth, but regions still need companies that export or are at the technological frontier to raise demand, productivity and pay. Labour should work with the government's Levelling Up White Paper, but this was overly focussed on cities and knowledge intensive business services: there is an economic case for including towns and manufacturing too, and they should prioritise connecting places and sectors, building on the diverse strengths which different places can offer, and setting a long‐term direction of travel. Over time, Labour should try to ensure that cities, towns and smaller communities are better connected, better coordinated and more specialised within larger regions. Labour should, therefore, set out an industrial and regional strategy; work up an economic development toolkit; and devolve economic powers to Mayoral Combined Authorities and councils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have some territories performed better than others in the fight against COVID‐19? This paper uses a novel dataset on excess mortality, trust and political polarization for 165 European regions to explore the role of social and political divisions in the remarkable regional differences in excess mortality during the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic. First, we investigate whether regions characterized by a low social and political trust witnessed a higher excess mortality. Second, we argue that it is not only levels, but also polarization in trust among citizens – in particular, between government supporters and non‐supporters – that matters for understanding why people in some regions have adopted more pro‐healthy behaviour. Third, we explore the partisan make‐up of regional parliaments and the relationship between political division – or what we refer to as 'uncooperative politics'. We hypothesize that the ideological positioning – in particular those that lean more populist – and ideological polarization among political parties is also linked to higher mortality. Accounting for a host of potential confounders, we find robust support that regions with lower levels of both social and political trust are associated with higher excess mortality, along with citizen polarization in institutional trust in some models. On the ideological make‐up of regional parliaments, we find that, ceteris paribus, those that lean more 'tan' on the 'GAL‐TAN' spectrum yielded higher excess mortality. Moreover, although we find limited evidence of elite polarization driving excess deaths on the left‐right or GAL‐TAN spectrums, partisan differences on the attitudes towards the European Union demonstrated significantly higher deaths, which we argue proxies for (anti)populism. Overall, we find that both lower citizen‐level trust and populist elite‐level ideological characteristics of regional parliaments are associated with higher excess mortality in European regions during the first wave of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Papers in Regional Science is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Applying a spatialized data envelopment analysis, this paper estimates and analyzes the efficiency of European Union NUTS‐2 regions during the period 2000–2014. The space‐dependent efficiency scores estimated with the proposed model show a bimodal distribution that is not detected by the aspatial approach. The results confirm the crucial role of location of production units, offering important new insights on both the causes of regional disparities in labor productivity and the observed polarization of the European distribution of per capita income. The findings further suggest significant differences for the two subgroups (spatial clusters) of regional economies found in the correlation analysis between the efficiency scores and the components of the EU Regional Competitiveness Index. Consequently, policies suitable for one group of regions may not be suitable or appropriate for the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The health impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic across OECD (Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development) and European regions has been strikingly uneven. In 2020, excess mortality rates in the hardest‐hit regions were, on average, 17 percentage points higher than those in the least affected regions of the same country. This paper shows that low health system capacity, followed by population density, air pollution, the share of elderly people, and low institutional quality were associated with higher excess mortality during the first year of the pandemic. Finally, reduced home‐to‐work mobility, following governments' COVID‐19 responses, was associated with lower excess mortality 2 months after implementation of the measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inequality is a central explanation of political distrust in democracies, but has so far rarely been considered a cause of (dis‐)trust towards supranational governance. Moreover, while political scientists have extensively engaged with income inequality, other salient forms of inequality, such as the regional wealth distribution, have been sidelined. These issues point to a more general shortcoming in the literature. Determinants of trust in national and European institutions are often theorized independently, even though empirical studies have demonstrated large interdependence in citizens' evaluations of national and supranational governance levels. In this paper, we argue that inequality has two salient dimensions: (1) income inequality and (2) regional inequality. Both dimensions are important antecedent causes of European Union (EU) trust, the effects of which are mediated by evaluations of national institutions. On the micro‐level, we suggest that inequality decreases a person's trust in national institutions and thereby diminishes the positive effect of national trust on EU trust. On the macro‐level, inequality decreases country averages of trust in national institutions. This, however, informs an individual's trust in the EU positively, compensating for the seemingly untrustworthiness of national institutions. Finally, we propose that residing in an economically declining region can depress institutional trust. We find empirical support for our arguments by analysing regional temporal change over four waves of the European Social Survey 2010–2016 with a sample of 209 regions nested in 24 EU member states. We show that changes in a member state's regional inequality have similarly strong effects on trust as changes in the Gini coefficient of income inequality. Applying causal mediation techniques, we can show that the effects of inequality on EU trust are largely mediated through citizens' evaluations of national institutions. In contrast, residing in an economically declining region directly depresses EU trust, with economically lagging areas turning their back on European governance and resorting to the national level instead. Our findings highlight the relevance of regional inequality for refining our understanding of citizens' support for Europe's multi‐level governance system and the advantages of causal modelling for the analysis of political preferences in a multi‐level governance system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We quantify the general equilibrium effects on economic growth of improving the quality of institutions at the regional level in the context of the implementation of the European Cohesion Policy for the European Union and the UK. The direct impact of changes in the quality of government is integrated in a general equilibrium model to analyse the system‐wide economic effects resulting from additional endogenous mechanisms and feedback effects. The results reveal a significant direct effect as well as considerable system‐wide benefits from improved government quality on economic growth. A small 5 per cent increase in government quality across European Union regions increases the impact of Cohesion investment by up to 7 per cent in the short run and 3 per cent in the long run. The exact magnitude of the gains depends on various local factors, including the initial endowments of public capital, the level of government quality, and the degree of persistence over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical studies examining the interplay between informal and formal institutions on economic growth are scarce. As a result, we do not know how differences in trust affect the economic returns of the quality of regional governments and their autonomy. A panel regression analysis of 208 regions in 21 EU countries shows that informal and formal institutions matter for economic growth, individually and in combination. More specifically, trust substitutes the quality of regional government but does not affect the economic impact of its degree of decentralization. Therefore, policymakers need to think creatively about harnessing institutions to promote economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leaving the parental home is a milestone in young people's transition to adulthood. The timing of leaving home varies greatly across European countries; however, evidence on the association between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and the age at leaving home in a comparative perspective is mixed, and subnational variation has received little attention. The module on the timing of life events included in Round 3 (2006) and 9 (2018) of the European Social Survey offers the opportunity to study how parental SES is associated with the age at leaving home, and how this association varies at the national and regional level for a sample of respondents born between the 1950s and the 1980s in 175 regions across 29 European countries. Results from three‐level linear regression models indicate that a high parental SES postpones women's age at leaving home in most Southern and Eastern European countries, where state support to young people is low and family ties are strong, whereas the association between parental SES and the age at leaving home is less clear‐cut in Western and Nordic countries. Between‐country variation in the association between parental SES and the age at home‐leaving prevails over within‐country variation, suggesting that the role of the parental background is country‐specific and that other unobserved factors may explain within‐country heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of smart specialization (S3) as a fundamental pillar of the 2014 reform of the EU cohesion policy is a significant strategic shift in European development intervention. S3 strategies aimed at mobilizing the economic potential of each country and region of the EU by allowing a more place‐based and bottom‐up approach to development. However, despite the salience that S3 has acquired in a short period of time, there has been no European‐wide evaluation of the extent to which S3 strategies truly reflect the economic characteristics and potential of the territories where they are being implemented. This article examines the characteristics of S3 strategies across Europe – by focusing on their development axes, economic or scientific domains and policy priorities – to assess whether this is the case. The results show that S3 strategies display a proliferation of objectives, a problem that particularly affects areas with weaker quality of government. Moreover, strategies are generally loosely connected with the intrinsic conditions of each region and mostly mimic what neighbouring areas are doing. The lack of more concise and focused S3 strategies is likely to undermine the effectiveness of what is, otherwise, a very interesting and worthwhile policy experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)