The study of the influence of decentralisation on economic growth has received some attention in recent years, but very few studies deal with its impact on regional inequalities. This paper analyses the impact of both fiscal and political decentralisation on regional inequalities using alternative measures for a sample of 17 OECD countries. In order to check for other possible influences, the study also includes measures of public-sector size and the type of party in government. The final section studies the relevance of fiscal decentralisation in the regional convergence process observed by several authors during the past two decades. The research reveals a strong negative correlation between decentralisation, especially fiscal decentralisation, and regional inequalities, and also a positive influence of decentralisation on regional convergence.
This paper tries to give a better understanding of the convergence process among the regions of the EU. It focuses on the role of structural change and infrastructures in this process. First we analyse the convergence of production, labour and productivity among the European Union (EU) regions for the period 1980-96. We then study the impact of structural change in this process. The second part of this article deals with infrastructure, which - since the beginning of the application of EU regional policy - has been one of the main instruments for generating cohesion among EU countries and regions, and was one of the determinants of regional growth and convergence for three periods, namely: 1970-80, 1980-86 and 1988-94. The main findings are: first, that convergence seems to be a complex process, in which structural change is a relevant force; and, second, that infrastructure could be one of the factors that fosters regional growth and convergence.
This paper investigates regional development dynamics in a sample of 254 NUTS 2 European Union regions over the period 2000--2010. To that end, we propose a new version of the regional Lisbon index containing changes with respect the index developed by Dijkstra. The regional Lisbon index includes employment, education and R&D indicators. Targets for these indicators are related to an action and economic development plan for the EU regions and have been incorporated into European Regional Policy programming. The analysis of regional development is based on the estimation of the spatial Durbin model, containing endogenous and exogenous interaction effects. We compare the performance of different specifications of the spatial weights matrix describing the spatial arrangement of the sample regions finding evidence in favour of an exponential-decay distance matrix. Using this matrix, we determine the extent to which a change in a covariate in a particular region affects development in other regions.
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