Research on convergence deals with the question of whether regional disparities are decreasing over time. Aiming to decompose EU disparities covering regions of all levels, this paper fills the gap of the empirical research on convergence in the EU in the following ways: (i) the research updates the assessment of regional disparities in the EU emphasizing, but not limited to, the analysis at the NUTS 3 level; (ii) based on a constructed three-level Theil index, the research decomposes EU disparities into between-country, within-country at the NUTS 2 level, and within the NUTS 2 region at the NUTS 3 level components, covering the period of 1995-2014 and all EU regions, (iii) it examines the linkages between the development of innovation and technology, sustainability, and evolution of disparities. Our main findings suggest that convergence in the EU is still present at different regional levels, but its speed is slowing down. Total EU disparities were decreasing mainly because of reducing disparities between member states. At the same time, in the majority of EU member states, old and new, within-country disparities were growing at all regional levels, and now within-country disparities account for almost two-fifths of total EU disparities.
One of the most pressing problems nowadays attracting attention of EU citizens is the integration of immigrants. During the recent period immigration flows to the EU, especially external, were growing considerably-the number of international immigrants in the EU has increased by 57.5 percent over 2000-2015. One of the factors leading to successful integration of immigrants is attitudes towards them regarding their impact on countries' socioeconomic , cultural or other transformation. Empirical studies show that immigration can lead to both positive and negative effects on countries' demography, economy, culture and criminogenic situation depending on the immigrants' education, age, gender and other characteristics. Nevertheless, even if immigration leads to a positive transformation of the country, society's attitude towards immigration can be negative and this can complicate the process of integration. For this reason, it is important to investigate not only the effects of immigration on countries' demography, economy, culture and other areas, but also to investigate society's attitudes towards benefits and losses of immigration. We employed binary logistic regression to analyse the EU society's attitudes towards consequences of immigration. The results show that public attitudes toward consequences of immigration are largely negative, especially towards impact on criminogenic situation and this does not match actual impact empirically researched by other authors and presented in the literature review.
Abstract. In this research, we investigate the impact of human capital on labour productivity in European Union member states using panel data analysis. Results of the paper are estimated using the Pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) and Fixed effects model (FEM). The results show that human capital is positively significant in improving the growth of labour productivity in the EU. Our estimates also suggest that the impact occurs after three times lags in case of education expenditure.
Reduction of the territorial disparities in terms of their development level is the main aim of the European Union’s (EU’s) regional support. Most of the previous studies investigate the linear relationship between support and growth at countries’ or NUTS1/2 disaggregation level, omitting the question on what is the impact of this support on regional convergence among NUTS3 regions and on whether non-linear effects occur. To fill this gap, we modified the difference-in-differences estimator to test empirically the non-linear convergence effects of the EU’s regional support at NUTS 3 level over the 2000-2006 programming period, taking into account the possible lagging effect. The results revealed that the impact of regional support on convergence is positive with the diminishing marginal effect as the intensity of payments is increasing. Moreover, we find evidence that the return is higher for the post-intervention compared with the intervention period, i.e. the convergence outcomes of the EU’s support occur in the long-run.
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