This paper extends resilience literature by empirically exploring the relationship between regional innovation performance and resistance and recovery aspects of regional labour resilience among NUTS 2 regions in the EU-28 after great economic crisis in the last decade. The results of a multinomial logit regression model indicate differentiated effect of innovation performance with respect to different phases of resilience. Empirical findings clearly point out a very heterogeneous resilience path among EU regions offering evidence that a region-tailored innovation approach embodied in the smart specialization strategy is vital for achieving higher labour resilience during (resistance phase) and immediately after (recovery phase) an external shock.

Research on the impact of decentralisation has generally overlooked the fact that the economic returns of transferring powers and resources to subnational tiers of government greatly depend on the quality of the devolved government. Scholarly literature has also neglected that these returns may be similarly affected by the autonomy of neighbouring areas and their government quality. In this paper, we use panel data fixed effects analyses and spatial Durbin econometric models to assess the extent to which the economic returns of political and fiscal decentralisation in the European Union between 2000 and 2015 are mediated by local government quality and that of neighbouring regions. The results suggest that the economic benefits of regional autonomy are greater in regions with a better government quality, while regions with a low quality of government grow less, regardless of their level of decentralisation. The gains of decentralisation mainly accrue through indirect effects, as regions grow more if surrounded by other, more decentralised regions than through their own level of decentralisation. In all cases, local government quality is a powerful driver of growth, irrespective of whether a region is considered individually or in relationship to its neighbours.

Culture and tourism have always been related, but with blurred interpretations of the empirical relationship between those phenomena. This paper estimates the impact of different cultural indicators on tourism development in 27 EU member states for the period 2008–2018, by using dynamic panel data. The results indicate that the number of UNESCO Heritage Sites do not have a significant influence on the number of tourism overnights, whereas there are significant positive effects on international tourism receipts and tourism employment. Moreover, the additional cultural sector specifics considered in the analysis; government expenditure on culture and employment in culture, showed to have a significant positive influence on all three tourism indicators used in the research. In addition, the research results indicate that the real GDP per capita and the level of human capital are significant drivers of tourism development.

This research extends the literature on regional inequalities in the European Union in two directions. First, it confirms the importance of institutions for regional inequalities among 18 EU member countries, and second, indicates which dimension of the institutional quality is important by using the six dimensions of the Worldwide Governance Indicator. The results support standard "rules of engagement" that reduce transaction costs by lowering uncertainty and facilitating the mutual trustworthiness of individual economic agents that spread equally among regions in specific countries. In addition, we interpret empirical evidence to determine that institutions also shape regional inequalities indirectly through political channels.

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