Towards a conclusion: Regional and territorial policy recommendations

Advances in Spatial Science

Volumn 54, Issue , 2008, Pages 283-306

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EID: 84877897685     PISSN: 14309602     EISSN: 21979375     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-74737-6_12     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. These simulations were performed as part of the ESPON 3.4.2 Project exploring the “Territorial impact of EU economic policies”. For the complete report, see the ESPON website, www.espon.eu
2. Among OLD15 countries, according to the MASST simulation, internal disparities will diminish only in Belgium, Austria and Finland; they will increase in all NEW12 countries, and in a particularly marked manner in the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria (in decreasing order).
3. The ‘classical’ equilibrating process relies on downward flexibility of prices and wages, which is widely hampered by the existence of national wage contracts in both private and public structures and by the homogeneity of import prices (recall that regions are very open economies). The second, ‘modern’ process relies on the devaluation of the currency, and it is automatically excluded in an inter-regional context.
4. The importance of this last point is magnified by the consideration that, with the creation of exchange rate agreements and large monetary unions, states will increasingly lose control over the external value of their currency, and will increasingly behave within the unions like regions within a nation.
5. Krugman speaks of a general “competitiveness obsession”, mainly referring to the case of countries.
6. From a modelling point of view, already fifteen years ago it was shown that, if the linearity assumptions of the traditional neoclassical model were abandoned and some non-linearities and increasing returns introduced, the same neoclassical model could well accommodate varied possible outcomes both spatial diffusion and concentration (Miyao, 1987)
7. ‘endogenous growth’ models, which include cumulative processes in a neoclassical production function (Romer, 1986), mainly end up with an interregional divergence process.
8. The Italian experience of the first economic boom, 1957-64, totally concentrated in only three areas Milan, Turin and Genoa, the ‘north-western triangle’ is telling in this regard: wage and cost inflation, massive migration from the south, social and political tensions, deterioration in environmental quality due to excessively rapid economic transformation, generated the precocious end of the expansion phase, the early disappearance of previous competitiveness, and fifteen years of slow growth in these areas until the end of the following decade. History may repeat itself.
9. An operational methodology for the Territorial Impact Assessment of EU policies, along the lines suggested by the Commission and emphasising the three dimensions of ‘territorial cohe sion’, namely territorial efficiency, quality and identity, has recently been developed with the TEQUILA model Territorial Efficiency, QUality, Identity Layered Assessment
10. Roberto Camagni, 2006.
11. GREMI (Groupe de Recherche Européen sur les Milieux Innovateurs) is an international group of scholars interested in the determinants of local factors fostering innovation at the local scale.
12. For a critical assessment of the concept of territorial cohesion and its interpretation as “the territorial dimension of sustainability”
13. Roberto Camagni, 2006 and 2007.
14. Significant innovations are apparent in this passage. First, traditional “spatial development policies” are called “territorial”, using a neologism in the English language that suggests an exploitation of local specificities that extends beyond pure location and distance in space. Second, the concept of territorial capital is used for the first time, implicitly underlining the fact that territory is a resource potentially generating productivity increases (“higher return for specific kinds of investment”) and utility flows to local communities.