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Since the late 2000s, the concept of regional economic resilience has become the new buzzword in economic geography. Despite considerable attention, a common sentiment in the literature is that regional economic resilience is an underdeveloped and fuzzy concept. Therefore, this paper conducted a scoping review of 168 articles on the concept of regional economic resilience from 2000 to 2022 to assess its present conceptual state. The paper finds that the notion of regional economic resilience has become a well-developed concept and does not bear the markers of a fuzzy concept anymore. A conceptual framework is advanced.

Building upon the evidence that the mafia increases the degree of vote concentration, we use data on regional elections in Sicily to estimate the impact of anti-mafia policies on electoral competition. We find robust evidence that the reassignment for social purposes of property and assets seized to the mafia reduces the degree of electoral concentration. This result supports the hypothesis that policies that create social value, such as the reallocation to social-driven organizations, are more effective than those targeted to public and political institutions.

The narrative used to describe smart cities, including the experimentation on them, affects the perception of the smart city. This study systematically assembles and analyses ‘public facing’ smart city project data from acrossthe EU. Using a bibliographic analysis, including word frequency analyses across time and countries of project descriptions, we identify the dominant themes and constructs in the Smart city narratives used by teams advancing Smart City projects. The study highlights spatial and inter-temporal variations in locational density, differing project content and the range of conceptual emphases. Results show that the main concern of Smart city narratives in the EU is firmly centred on energy. We argue that policy makers should aim for better alignment of smart cities’ narrative with citizens’ perception or, at least, a wider description of the very nature of implemented projects to include those rather neglected aspects might attract more interest and citizens’ involvement.

Whilst the properties of decision regret have been widely explored in experimental and game theoretic studies, the empirical features of regret from large-scale ‘binary decision’ national events in practice have garnered less scrutiny. This study is an empirical investigation of novel survey data reporting ‘Brexit’ voting choices and expressions of a desire to change voting choices post-referendum. We investigate if Leave voters are more or less likely to express a change to their binary referendum vote choice than those who voted Remain or abstained and then identify the particular characteristics of those who regret their vote choice. A large-scale pan-European survey is used to capture citizens’ perceptions of the European Union containing 17,147 interviews of adults from 15 EU member states. Using responses from UK citizens ( n = 1500), focus is directed to the vote choice for the ‘Brexit’ referendum and the corresponding choice if the referendum were held ‘today’. Probit regression estimation identifies the key differences in the characteristics of those who expressed regret by indicating a desire to change voting choices. Results show that knowledge of EU funding policies, permanence of residential location, population size of the local area, educational attainment, employment status and income are key drivers for regretting the referendum voting decision.

The use of Composite Indicators (CIs) experienced significant momentum in recent years within academia, policy makers, practitioners, and global institutions. Despite the burst of popularity, an ongoing criticism has been developed around their computation with respect to both weighting and aggregation. In brief, weighting involves the relative importance of the attributes chosen, whereas the latter involves the process that transforms them into a single value. The use of CIs for the analysis of spatial differences in levels of development and well-being shares the above criticism, therefore, encouraging initiatives (e.g. OECD, Better Life Index (BLI)) to somewhat overcome the weighting issue. Nonetheless, initiatives like the BLI come at the price of missing a single overall measure of spatial performance. This study, instead, in the attempt to contribute to the ‘beyond GDP (Gross Domestic Product)’ international trend, builds upon a very recent methodological contribution—the σ–μ efficiency (Greco et al. 2019)—that takes into account both the aforementioned issues by combining the use of Stochastic Multi-attribute Acceptability Analysis with an approach which accounts for both the average performance and its spread according to different weighting vectors. More in detail, the analysis aims to measure spatial socio-economic differences at the regional level by using the wide set of indicators developed within the BES (Benessere Equo e Sostenibile) initiative from the Italian national statistical institute (ISTAT). When applied to the Italian regional case study, the σ–μ efficiency while confirming the overall North-South divide, shows a more nuanced picture with interesting differences with respect to well-established alternative aggregation techniques such as equal weight. Considering three macro areas (North, Centre, and South), the analysis confirms the trend already observed GDP-wise and shows that the divide is moving from the tripartite North–Centre–South division to a bipartite Centre/North–South one, according to a much broader set of socio-economic indicators. Hence, it shows that the divide is much deeper and generalised than the extent to which it is captured by spatial differences in GDP alone. At a more granular level, with particular regard to the Southern macro area, by disentangling the overall performance (μ) from the balance between the considered components (σ) the analysis does show potential for an important contribution in the field of spatial analysis at least to the extent that it allows unveiling complex patterns of uneven socio-economic performance. For instance, both Puglia and Sardegna, sharing the same (higher) frontier, register a better performance than geographically confining regions such as Basilicata, Calabria, and Campania and the other big island Sicilia, respectively. Furthermore, moving from the consideration that such a pattern is not fully confirmed in terms of GDP, the current σ–μ analysis methodologically confirms the existence of trade-offs and synergies between GDP and overall spatial disparities.

In recent times, composite indicators have gained astounding popularity in a wide variety of research areas. Their adoption by global institutions has further captured the attention of the media and policymakers around the globe, and their number of applications has surged ever since. This increase in their popularity has solicited a plethora of methodological contributions in response to the substantial criticism surrounding their underlying framework. In this paper, we put composite indicators under the spotlight, examining the wide variety of methodological approaches in existence. In this way, we offer a more recent outlook on the advances made in this field over the past years. Despite the large sequence of steps required in the construction of composite indicators, we focus particularly on two of them, namely weighting and aggregation. We find that these are where the paramount criticism appears and where a promising future lies. Finally, we review the last step of the robustness analysis that follows their construction, to which less attention has been paid despite its importance. Overall, this study aims to provide both academics and practitioners in the field of composite indices with a synopsis of the choices available alongside their recent advances.

One of the most influential measures of multidimensional well-being, the Better Life Index, launched by OECD in 2011, contains a detailed overview of the social, economic, and environmental performances of different countries. Since its launch, a relevant number of empirical studies have been proposed on these data, but the role played by the distance between societal priorities and country-level performance in Better Life Index as well as in multidimensional well-being remains underexplored. We propose to address this issue by means of a multidimensional spatial model. We position the countries in the Euclidean K-dimensional space in which each dimension is a specific aspect of well-being, and we consider each individual's opinion on the same dimensions to calculate the personal optimal point. The distance between the optimal point of well-being and the actual observed point at individual level is the individuals' loss in well-being. We show that the societal loss at country-level is negatively related to the overall well-being and the main indices of quality of democracy. Based on the above evidence, we would argue that a multidimensional spatial framework represents a promising tool for the analysis of the whole class of multidimensional measures of well-being in which a group of individuals expresses the weights individually assigned to a set of dimensions within a pre-established range.

The concept of resilience has attracted increasing interest in regional economics. In the flourishing literature, however, results are far from being conclusive, even when referring to the same case study. Undoubtedly, this mixed evidence potentially stems also from different operationalization of the multifaceted resilience concept; the main difference being between studies using GDP series and those measuring regional economic performance in terms of fluctuations in employment levels. The different choices and the subsequent results, far from being interpreted as lack of robustness, are research specific; nevertheless, it is important to address what kind of relationship – if any – exists between the two measures. To this end, we analyse and compare the results concerning the regional resilience in Italy, over the last 40 years, focussing on the differences deriving from the choice between the two aforementioned measures. Our analysis reveals that the information contained in the different series, rather than being alternative and overlapping, is complementary.

We consider the issue of ranking regions with respect to a range of economic and social variables. Departing from the current practice of aggregating different dimensions via a composite index, usually based on an arithmetic mean, we instead use stochastic multi-attribute acceptability analysis (SMAA). SMAA considers the ‘whole space’ of weights for the considered dimensions. The methodology is applied to the ranking of Italian regions, showing that although the north–south divide is definitely wider than the one measured simply in terms of gross domestic product. There are southern regions that perform generally better than those belonging to their broad region: a kind of ‘northern regions within the southern broad region’. This result poses interesting questions about the uneven development of Italian regions.

This paper deals with the relationship between decentralisation, regional economic development, and income inequality within regions. Using multiplicative interaction models and regionally aggregated microeconomic data for more than 100 000 individuals in the European Union (EU), it addresses two main questions. First, whether fiscal and political decentralisation in Western Europe has an effect on within-regional interpersonal inequality. Second, whether this potential relationship is mediated by the level of economic development of the region. The results of the analysis show that greater fiscal decentralisation is associated with lower interpersonal income inequality, but, as regional income rises, further decentralisation is connected to a lower decrease in inequality. This finding is robust to the measurement and definition of income inequality, as well as to the weighting of the spatial units by their population size. Keywords: income inequality, income per capita, fiscal and political decentralisation, interaction, regions, Europe

This study provides an empirical assessment of the socioeconomic factors that determine household exclusion from consumer financial services. A unique microeconomic data set, of interview data, collected from a representative cross-sectional sample of 1,005 households is analysed using logistic regression techniques. In investigating exclusion from consumer financial services, both financial self-exclusion and institutional led financial exclusion are examined. Indicators of financial self-exclusion include the absence of a savings account or home contents insurance, while indicators of institutional led financial exclusion include the use of ‘doorstep lenders’. Findings show that both measures of financial self-exclusion are determined by income, education, age, housing tenure and social participation while financial exclusion is generally associated with socioeconomic characteristics such as age, gender, housing tenure, working status, income, disability and the presence of young people in household but not with respondents’ residential area, education level, internet use and social participation. These results are useful to both policy makers and financial services providers. They provide useful insights to policy makers and could have an important bearing on the range and mix of policies, and policy instruments, that local and central Government could use to mitigate their extent.

Previous research has suggested that after 1996 devolution caused a reduction in regional disparities in Italy. However the analysis presented here suggests that the decline in regional disparities in Italy between 1996 and 2006 was driven by population dynamics and, to some extent, by the loss of competitiveness and consequent poor relative performance of northern regions. We conclude that links between devolution and the reduction of spatial disparities is unproven and its benefits are temporally and geographically uneven.

Resilience is a concept derived from engineering and ecology relating to the way in which systems react to, and recover from, shocks. According to several recent analyses, different ‘resilience behaviours’ are able to explain differences in the economic performance of regions. This study shows that this explanation is not fully convincing when applied to the Italian regions, observed in the very long run. This analysis focuses on real per capita income levels over the period 1890-2009. Only few (major) shocks emerge to have a specific impact effect differing across the regions, while the recovery experiences never differ significantly across regions. This is accounted for by systematic and persistent differences in the economic performance of Italian regions; hence, it is difficult to discern genuine differences in regional resilience behaviour.

The authors analyse the effects of public spending on tourism in the regions of Italy by adopting a cross-sectional regression analysis approach. The evaluation is made possible by the availability of a database under the project entitled ‘Conti Pubblici Territoriali’ (‘Regional Public Accounts’) of the Ministero dello sviluppo economico (Ministry of Economic Development), wherein the spending of all public institutions is aggregated for each region and classified according to different criteria, including the sectoral criterion. Furthermore, the effects of public spending on tourism on the tourism attractiveness of various regions are also investigated. Generally, the effectiveness of public spending appears to be deficient.

After a decade of devolution and amid uncertainties about its effects, it is timely to assess and reflect upon the evidence and enduring meaning of any ‘economic dividend’ of devolution in the UK. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach utilising institutionalist and quantitative methods, this paper seeks to discern the nature and extent of any ‘economic dividend’ through a conceptual and empirical analysis of the relationships between spatial disparities, spatial economic policy and decentralisation. Situating the UK experience within the historical context of its evolving geographical political economy, we find: i) a varied and uneven nature of the relationships between regional disparities, spatial economic policy and decentralisation that change direction during specific time periods; ii) the role of national economic growth is pivotal in explaining spatial disparities and the nature and extent of their relationship with the particular forms of spatial economic policy and decentralisation deployed; and, iii) there is limited evidence that any ‘economic dividend’ of devolution has emerged but this remains difficult to discern because its likely effects are over-ridden by the role of national economic growth in decisively shaping the pattern of spatial disparities and in determining the scope and effects of spatial economic policy and decentralisation.