Specialisation and growth: the detection of European regional convergence clubs

Mora, Toni; Vayá, Esther; Suriñach, Jordi

doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2004.07.010

Cited by 21 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However reading the process of convergence/divergence along the lines of the neoclassical (old and ‘new’) growth theory and/or of the new economic geography paradigms may miss important features of growth and transformation processes that were relevant for old members' regions and that we expect to be even more so for newcomers. In fact, studies analysing the regions of the older EU members find that socio‐economic groups (Rodríguez‐Pose 1998a, b, 1999) and specialisation patterns (Mora et al . 2005; Mora 2008) play an important role in explaining disparities in those countries.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Income Disparities in the Enlarged Eu: Socio‐economic, Specialisation and Geographical Clusters

Chapman

Meliciani

2011

Tijd voor Econ & Soc Geog

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The paper contains a non‐parametric analysis of regional convergence in the enlarged EU over the period 1998–2005. It finds overall convergence but growing within country disparities, especially due to the behaviour of newcomer regions. It also finds strong (but falling) spatial correlation of per‐capita income. Starting from this evidence, the paper considers the role of socio‐economic features, specialisation patterns and geographical factors in explaining within countries disparities. Overall we find that partly specialisation but more evidently socio‐economic clusters have a good explanatory power while simple geographical factors do not explain within countries divergence. This does not mean that spatial factors are not important: rather it means that agglomeration alone cannot explain a complex and variegated pattern of growth where structural and socio‐economic factors appear to be playing an important and increasing role.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Income Disparities in the Enlarged Eu: Socio‐economic, Specialisation and Geographical Clusters

Chapman

Meliciani

2011

Tijd voor Econ & Soc Geog

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…given that regions specialized in technologically advanced sectors tend to converge towards a more rapid growth path than regions specialized in traditional and low-tech productive activities [140,141,142].…”

Section: The Co-evolution Of Regional and Sectoral Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Innovation and the competitiveness of industries: Comparing the mainstream and the evolutionary approaches

Castellacci

2008

Technological Forecasting and Social Change

109

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The study of the relationships between innovation and the competitiveness of industries is an important topic for both, academic research and economic policy. The huge economics literature flourished in the last couple of decades on the subject broadly falls into two distinct research traditions, namely the mainstream R&D spillovers approach and the evolutionary economics view. Both traditions agree on the important role played by innovation and the intersectoral diffusion of advanced knowledge for the competitive performance of industrial sectors. Behind this general agreement, however, the two approaches are radically different. This paper shows that, at a deeper level of analysis, the mainstream and evolutionary views do indeed differ with respect to their theoretical foundations, empirical research and policy implications. In a nutshell, while the mainstream R&D spillover approach is inspired by a traditional view of economic policy based on a market-oriented approach, the evolutionary view is on the contrary consistent with the idea that institutional arrangements and policy interventions do indeed play a fundamental role for shaping innovation patterns and their impacts on the competitiveness of industries.

show abstract

“…2 Methodology 2.1 Regional growth Mora et al (2005) identify regional growth poles as opposed to periphery regions in Europe, which exhibit signi cantly di erent growth patterns, respectively. Likewise, despite the ongoing harmonization of nancial industries across European countries, the e ciency of banks to intermediate nancial funds remains not only heterogeneous across national banking markets but also at the regional level within countries (Bos and Kool, 2006).…”

Section: Non-technical Summarymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Quality of Banking and Regional Growth

Hasan

Koetter²,

Wedow

2007

SSRN Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We test whether output growth in European economic agglomeration regions depends on nancial development. To this end we suggest a relative measure of the quality of nancial institutions rather than the usual quantity proxy of nancial development. In order to measure the quality of nancial development we use pro t e ciency derived from stochastic frontier analysis. We show that more e cient banks spur regional growth while the typically used quantity measure of nancial development is negligible. Also, our results suggest an additional channel through which better banking can spur growth: the interaction of more credit with e cient banks.Keywords: Bank performance, regional growth, bank e ciency, Europe JEL: G21, O16, O47, O52 Non-technical summary The creation of an e cient nancial system is an explicit objective of the European Commission. Ongoing harmonization of regulation to foster an increasingly homogenous European banking system ultimately serves the purpose to enhance competition and thereby economic prosperity.At the same time, regional di erences continue to persist across European banking markets. Therefore, we investigate in this study whether regional bank e ciency has a positive impact on regional growth. We employ bank-speci c data to estimate pro t e ciency with stochastic frontier analysis for approximately 3,000 banks active in 160 European regions between 1997 and 2003.Our study thus analyzes if a micro-economic measure of banks' abilities to convert savings and deposits e ciently into loans suited to fund investments is positively a ecting regional economic growth.Our results con rm that higher mean pro t e ciency fosters regional output growth. In particular, in Europe's fairly mature economic regions this quality channel for growth appears to be of larger importance compared to the traditionally employed quantity channel . In contrast to regional bank pro t e ciency, neither the e ect of credit volume relative to gross domestic product nor the interaction between quality and quantity are individually statistically di erent from zero.The existence and economic signi cance of this quality channel of banking on growth is corroborated by our nding that it exhibits the largest positive magnitude when jointly speci ed with the quantity and interaction e ects of nancial development. Notably, in this parsimonious model all three measures a ect growth signi cantly positive. However, the e ect of improving regional pro t e ciency is approximately three times as large as the respective two alternatives. We conclude that future studies on the nance-growth nexus should try to accommodate explicitly these three distinct mechanisms through which nance may foster growth.

show abstract

Specialisation and growth: the detection of European regional convergence clubs

Cited by 21 publications

References 7 publications

Income Disparities in the Enlarged Eu: Socio‐economic, Specialisation and Geographical Clusters

Income Disparities in the Enlarged Eu: Socio‐economic, Specialisation and Geographical Clusters

Innovation and the competitiveness of industries: Comparing the mainstream and the evolutionary approaches

The Quality of Banking and Regional Growth

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About