Suchergebnisse

Regions economically differ from each other - they compete in different products and geographical spaces, exhibit different strengths and weaknesses, and provide different possibilities for growth and development. What fosters growth in one region may hamper it in another. This highly original book presents an accessible methodology for identifying competitors and their particular circumstances in Europe, discusses regional competitiveness from a conceptual perspective, and explores both past and future regional development policies in Europe. The authors illustrate that for the concept of reg

Teacher scaffolding, in which teachers support students adaptively or contingently, is assumed to be effective. Yet, hardly any evidence from classroom studies exists. With the current experimental classroom study we investigated whether scaffolding affects students' achievement, task effort, and appreciation of teacher support, when students work in small groups. We investigated both the effects of support quality (i.e., contingency) and the duration of the independent working time of the groups. Thirty social studies teachers of pre-vocational education and 768 students (age 12–15) participated. All teachers taught a five-lesson project on the European Union and the teachers in the scaffolding condition additionally took part in a scaffolding intervention. Low contingent support was more effective in promoting students' achievement and task effort than high contingent support in situations where independent working time was low (i.e. help was frequent). In situations where independent working time was high (i.e., help was less frequent), high contingent support was more effective than low contingent support in fostering students' achievement (when correcting for students' task effort). In addition, higher levels of contingent support resulted in a higher appreciation of support. Scaffolding, thus, is not unequivocally effective; its effectiveness depends, among other things, on the independent working time of the groups and students' task effort. The present study is one of the first experimental study on scaffolding in an authentic classroom context, including factors that appear to matter in such an authentic context.

Any form of Brexit will impact heterogeneously in terms of sectors and regions on the competitive position of firms in both the UK and Europe. The ongoing uncertainty about the conditions under which the UK will be leaving the EU creates difficulties in structurally estimating these impacts. Using uniquely detailed interregional trade data on goods and services for the EU, we apply a novel methodology that disentangles region-sector sensitivities (elasticities) of firms' competitive positions to (non)tariff barriers from the implications of different post-Brexit UK–EU trade scenarios. This enables us to derive the economic geography of competitive opportunities and vulnerabilities of Brexit of firms, along with the degree of uncertainty that surrounds these effects, independently from scenarios. Our analysis demonstrates that the adverse international competitive vulnerabilities of UK regions are much larger than those of the rest of the EU due to the dependency of the UK on the EU via global value chains. The impact on the competitive positions of firms means that within the UK, Brexit is likely to increase interregional inequalities. In contrast, interregional inequalities across Europe may actually fall, depending on the nature of the post-Brexit UK–EU trading arrangements. Moreover, the key political focus on the nature of the post-Brexit arrangements appears to be misplaced in that most UK regions are rather insensitive to the specific nature of the deal. As such, the economic geography implications of Brexit appear to be largely unrelated to UK domestic political narratives.