The dynamics of regional growth in Europe : social and political factors

Abstract

In a period of deep economic, social, and political transformation, regional disparities seem to be particularly resistant to change. The emergence of a global economy, the shift in production methods, and the greater mobility of capital, labour, and raw materials have not brought about a radical reshuffling of the prevailing regional disparities. There is a greater concentration of economic activity in core areas and very few peripheral regions are taking advantage of the process of global restructuring. The Dynamics of Regional Growth in Europe looks for the reasons behind this persistence in the social, political, and institutional arrangements of a large set of European regions, by trying to relate two scientific approaches concerned with regional economic performance, which share very little in common: the literature on socioeconomic restructuring and structural change, on the one hand, and neoclassical and endogenous growth theories, on the other.