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]
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]