Suchergebnisse

This paper analyzes the growth pathways of 1,321 regions in the European Union from 2003 to 2017. The aim is to inform integrated territorial investments and other economic development initiatives in lagging regions. Using the definition of lagging regions from the European Commission's Catching Up Initiative, more than two-thirds of the European Union member states have lagging regions when defined at the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics-3 scale. These small lagging regions are often hidden within larger and more prosperous regions. The paper considers the roles of industrial structure, innovation, and inward foreign direct investment as growth-enhancing factors. The findings indicate that the growth dynamics in low-income regions are different from those in regions in other income groups: there is no overall pattern in the contribution of industry to growth but there is a strong association between foreign direct investment and growth. Among low-growth lagging regions -- the 171 small regions in the European Union with gross domestic product per capita less than 90 percent of the European Union average, and stagnant or negative growth performance -- growth is correlated with construction and innovation. There are also differences in the growth pathways of rural and non-rural regions: growth is associated with moving away from agriculture in rural regions, and it is associated with construction and innovation in non-rural regions. The results imply that a finer geographic scale can be important in policy making and programming of Cohesion Policy Funds, to cater to different needs and opportunities at the scale of Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics-3 regions.

Rising political skepticism on the benefits of global economic integration has increased public scrutiny of the foreign activities of domestic firms in virtually all advanced economies. Decisions to invest in new activities abroad are seen by some commentators as potentially detrimental to domestic employment. We contribute to this debate by scrutinizing the relationship between outward 'greenfield' Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) and local employment levels. The analysis, at the scale of USA Economic Areas, finds a generally positive link between outward investment and local employment, but with an important range of differences across regions and sectors. Less developed regions benefit the most from the positive returns of outward FDI, and, particularly, from outward FDI if it is undertaken by firms in high-tech manufacturing and services industries. But there is a downside, in the form of increasing intra-regional inequalities between high-skilled and low-skilled workers in these areas.

AbstractUsing a large unbalanced panel dataset of more than 12,000 Italian manufacturing firms for the period 1999–2007, this paper investigates the role of geographic concentration and related variety on firms' total factor productivity (TFP). The main idea is that diversification—captured by a measure of vertically related variety—promotes firm innovativeness and, consequently, productivity, but when the technology has been consolidated, firms join specialized clusters that enhance efficiency. Our results suggest that the effect on firms' TFP of geographic concentration is stronger than that of related variety. We also confirm previous findings on the relevance of agglomeration forces for small firms compared with medium and large firms, where these agglomerative forces do not seem to influence TFP.