THE EUROPEAN TRANSLOCAL EMPOWERMENT: AN ECONOMETRIC APPROACH

Nowadays, there are numerous initiatives in response to contemporary socio-economic challenges. One possible response could be the social innovation phenomenon defined, according to Avelino et al. (2017), as the changing of social relations and involving new way of doing things. In this context, the aim of the paper is to discuss the empowerment and the social innovations concept by developing the empowerment mechanisms under a social psychology point of view, at one side, and exploring, in an empirical way, how people are empowered through transactional linkages, the translocal network. In particular, it is necessary to identify which translocal empowerment dimension is present across the European countries via the selection and the analysis of the possible social innovation proxies. To do this, it is necessary to comprehend the social innovation determinants at the macro-economic level across the European countries. Using the Akgüҁ multivariate regression model (2019), the paper studies the role of one possible social innovation proxy: the social protection expenditure. Under a methodological point of view, this model is used since it allows the combination between the traditional macro-level variables and the innovative ones, such as cultural norms and fear of failure; and it permits the inclusion of the country-specific characteristics. It also takes into account the macro-economic circumstance, the international financial crisis of 2008 until 2017. This period of analysis permits to control if the international economic crisis in 2008 might have influenced in some way the translocal empowerment dimension and brings together a panel data of different indicators from different data sources, such as Eurostat and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), which provides measures of the entrepreneurial behaviour within countries. As part of the robustness check, we have used social innovation measures that could include country fixed effects accounting the heterogeneities across European countries. What emerges from the present empirical study is that the translocal network could be considered as a crucial factor for the social innovation implementation, since social innovation actors might access the local resources, developing, at the same time, the ability to interface with the local institutions, present in the current socio-economic system.