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The inherent tension between regional equality and economic growth (efficiency) is recently much debated in the context of place based development policy and agglomeration in the European Union. A general conclusion reached in the literature is that a policy targeted at regional equality may be harmful for economic growth. Such policy therefore should be transformed in such a way that it also promotes the mobility of both people and firms and hence facilitates the possibilities of increased agglomeration. Recent insights from economic theories suggest that agglomeration externalities are not taken into account in the migration decision of firms and people, causing the dynamic urbanisation processes to not necessarily result in a (social) welfare optimum. This is even more so if other welfare effects than GDP and product variety are taken into account. Regional economic development is not sustainable if the dynamic urbanisation processes stemming from agglomeration economies do not lead to a welfare optimum. In this paper we assess the possibility of a non-sustainable regional development path. We conclude that strong additional negative externalities of growing large agglomerations are harder to prove than negative externalities of small agglomerations becoming smaller. Moreover, the size of short run negative effects that will stimulate the migration of people has not been adequately assessed. The European Union should therefore be careful in interpreting place-based costs and benefits of growing, large agglomerations at the detriment of small regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable development is indeed a complex phenomena, thus making the comparison and valuation of advances of EU-member states in the implementation of its objectives specifically difficult. The authors attempted to establish a synthetic measure of the level of sustainable development taking into account simultaneously three components: economic, social and environmental. It was aimed to compare particular countries by the mentioned measure and then grouping them. Relying on basis of content aspects the basics of research were 'headline indicators' of sustainable development, sourced from the 2005-2012 research period formed the premise of the study. The study results demonstrate ongoing gradual advances being made in the implementation of concepts of sustainable development in EU-member states. Although there can be visible a gradual convergence of EU-member states in respect of their levels of sustainable development, nonetheless majority of countries still post indicators of sustainable development below the EU average, especially those which recently became members of the European Union. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]