Suchergebnisse

AbstractEurope's 2020 strategy and the consequent initiative "Innovation Union" call for a particular attention to the territorial dimension of innovation and knowledge creation. To this end, this paper investigates the nature of knowledge production and diffusion among regions in 29 European Union (EU) countries and tries to assess its effectiveness. Data envelopment analysis is thus applied to assess how efficiently European regions use internal and external inputs for the production of new knowledge and ideas. The analysis produces a ranking of the innovative performance of EU regions for two points in time: the beginning of the current century and the second part of this decade. This ranking is then evaluated through the Malmquist productivity index in order to assess the relative importance of its main components. The Data envelopment analysis provides further evidence of a dualistic (centre versus periphery) pattern in the regional innovation activities, with the most efficient territories located in the most central or economically strategic areas of the continent. The application of the Malmquist productivity index shows that both the magnitude and intrinsic features of the productivity dynamics are extremely differentiated across regions. Again, we observe important differences between the core and periphery of Europe and, more specifically, between the rich and industrialized countries that form the so‐called "Old Europe" and the relatively poorer ones that have entered the EU quite recently.

Since the Lisbon agenda in 2000, Europe stated the goal to become the most advanced knowledge economy in the world relying specifically on the increase and strengthen of its human capital and technological endowments. However, given the presence of localized externalities in the knowledge accumulation process, this policy may produce distortive and unwanted consequences at the territorial level reinforcing the existing high inequalities among regions. Another crucial feature to be considered is the recent enlargement process of the European Union which has brought on stage new players characterized by a low average level of knowledge activity accompanied by a huge degree of internal territorial disparity. The aim of this paper is to identify the "knowledge regions" in Europe and to examine their main territorial features. To this aim we first build, for 287 regions belonging to 31 European countries, a comprehensive picture of the two variables - human capital and technological activity - which constitute the main pillars of the knowledge economy. For each of these two variables we construct several indicators examining their spatial distribution across the European regions. Further, we compute two synthetic indicators for human capital and technology and, on the basis of these two dimensions, we finally identify the knowledge regions.

We analyze the effects of an ALMP for disadvantaged workers implemented in a depressed area of Italy. Using propensity-score matching, we find that a) the employment subsidy had a positive effect for participants on both the probability of finding a job and income, b) the outcome of the policy was more positive for women, and c) the program was more effective for older and less-educated female workers. Using data on previous contacts between workers and firms and on informal channels for job search activity, we ultimately explore the role of the program in promoting the transition from informal to salaried employment.