Department of Planning and Regional Development

Universities are emerging growth determinants. This is so as, in addition to the fulfillment of their traditional role in teaching and (basic) research, universities, as aptly described within the helix framework, are expected to engage in regional development processes. The paper aims to detect trends of convergence among EU universities in terms of performance. To the best of our knowledge, this topic has not hitherto been examined. The empirical analysis of the paper covers the period 2014–2021, utilizes data obtained from URAP (University Ranking by Academic Performance), and employs the methodological approach of convergence clubs. The findings of the paper provide valuable insight into both theory and policy-making. We conclude that despite the unification of EU educational space, trends of divergence among EU universities are still present, and notable divisions still remain. Consequently, this indicates that the impact of EU universities on the formation of spatial dispariti...

The countries belonging to the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) of the EU are characterized by significant socioeconomic transformations and-more recently-by disconcerting instances of social and political turmoil. This comes to add to social and economic pressures applied to these countries under their process of market liberalization and economic integration, instigated at least in part by the very ENP process. In those conditions, questions of spatial cohesion and thus of regional convergence and divergence become increasingly salient, as the elimination of (social and) spatial imbalances is both a precondition for the legitimacy and successful implementation of the reforms aiming at market liberalization and economic integration and a core objective of such reforms. In this paper, we examine the spatial dynamics of population growth in the ENP countries prior to the recent destabilization in the region, using two complementary approaches-an analysis of the impact of agglomeration on growth and an analysis of club formation in population concentrations (convergencedivergence). We find that, on the whole, the ENPCs South space was characterized in Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

Understanding the forces driving regional growth in the EU is a major challenge for theory and policy. The opening of national borders, together with the rapid technological and scientific progress, has exposed regional economies to an extremely competitive, free-market, integrated economic environment, affecting their patterns of development. EU regions should, thus, be understood not only as national, geographic and administrative sub-divisions, but also as integral parts of the EU economic space. The paper develops a ...

The process of EU integration has been associated with a variety of outcomes in time and space. A critical question has to do with the impact of open markets on the differences, in economic performance, among more and less advanced countries. Given that industrial activity is more exposed to the forces of integration than any other productive activity, this discussion is more interesting when it focuses on industry. The paper aims to detect the determinants of industrial performance in the EU-15 countries covering the period 1980- ...

Understanding the forces driving regional growth in the EU is a major challenge for academics and policy-makers. The opening of national borders has exposed regional economies to an extremely competitive, free-market, integrated economic environment, affecting their patterns of development. EU regions should, thus, be understood not only as national, geographic and administrative, sub-divisions, but also as integral parts of the EU economic space. The paper develops an econometric regional growth model for the ...

The systemic change in Central and Eastern Europe has caused radical changes in the socioeconomic status of the European continent, with the parallel and interacting processes of integration and transition as the driving forces. The need for the period of transition and pre-accession to be re-evaluated is evident, concerning the mobility of economic activities and the possible re-location of industries, the behavior of the individual regions, the dynamics of regional discrepancies and the stability of the territorial structures, in the area of the EU new member-states. A series of question needs to be answered: i) what is the impact of economic integration on regional industrial patterns? ii) have advanced and lagging-behind regions developed similar or different types of regional specialization? iii) have metropolitan and peripheral regions developed the same or different mix of economic activities? iv) are there particular types of structural change more closely related to strong growth performance? v) is the process of integration associated with winners and losers at the regional level? The reported findings and conclusions constitute a valuable basis for the understanding of the impact of economic integration on regional structural change and cohesion in the EU new member-states' area.

The paper assesses on empirical grounds the level and the evolution of regional inequalities in each European Union new member-state (EU NMS) and examines the possibility for the emergence of regional convergence clubs. The experience of the EU NMS is a unique situation, where relatively closed economic systems opened, almost at once, to the world economy and, at the same time, market mechanisms replaced central planning. Thus, understanding the spatial pattern of regional growth in the EU NMS may provide valuable insight for theory and policy. The application of non linear econometric models, which transcend the "all or nothing" logic behind conventional convergence analysis, has shown the existence of regional convergence clubs in many EU NMS. The identification of regional convergence clubs, irrespective of the pattern that emerges in each EU NMS, highlights the heterogeneous spatial impact of the EU economic integration process.

The efforts for establishing a Single European Market, the recent (ie 2004 and 2007) enlargements, the overall regional and territorial policy and the introduction of the European Neighborhood Policy, represent an array of spatial and non-spatial policies that ...

Peripheral European economies are often characterized by unfavorable structural regularities and geographical coordinates, making the process of economic integration an experience possibly associated with welfare losses at the regional level. Such types of arguments are at variance with the neoclassical understanding of the operation of the spatial economy, making the study of a weak industrial base in the EU periphery an interesting assignment with implications for theory and policy. We develop an empirical model accounting for industrial (manufacturing) growth and decline in the Greek regions in the period following EU membership (1981–2005). Given that Greek regions are characterized as lagging behind and structurally weak for the entire period under consideration, understanding the factors behind their industrial experience may have a value added for many regions with similar characteristics, especially in the new and potential EU member states.

The processes of European Union (EU) integration and enlargement have produced a new regional socioeconomic map in Europe. Border regions, in particular, have been put in a state of flux. The reallocation of activities, opportunities and threats is changing their socioeconomic role and significance. Thus, border regions have become an issue of great importance during the last fifteen years in both the areas of scientific research and policy making. The overall picture of the actual dynamics occurring at the border regions, however, when economic barriers have been abolished, remains rather unclear. The absence of an appropriate methodological framework for the study of the impact of EU integration and enlargement dynamics on border regions is evident. The paper proposes a typology for the EU NUTS III border regions, interpreting the socioeconomic dynamics occurring within the enlarged EU space. Primary and secondary data, incorporating quantitative and qualitative determinants for border regions, were elaborated with integrated factor and fuzzy clustering analysis techniques. The proposed border regions typology provides a framework to assess the relative position of each EU border region in the EU space.

The abolition of the artificial impediments of cross-border interaction has produced a new EU regional socioeconomic map, releasing dynamics that have influenced significantly the EU socioeconomic space. Especially at the borderlands, a new mix of opportunities and ...

The Eastern Enlargement of the EU saw a proliferation of association agreements with countries in the 'near abroad' under EU's European Neighbourhood Policy framework. Although such agreements are considered to be strictly welfare-enhancing, there is very little evidence to show their economic effects, including their distributional consequences across space, separately from other concurrent processes (transition, internationalisation, capital deepening, etc). This paper draws on the experience of pre-accession agreements in Central and Eastern Europe to estimate the effect that such agreements had on regional growth, and thus on the long-run evolution of regional disparities, in the associated countries. We apply an event-analysis and exploit the country variation in the timing of these agreements to identify their distinctive effect on regional growth, using regional data at the NUTS3 levels covering the period from the early transition phase (1991/92) until the eruption of the financial crisis (2008). Our results provide strong evidence that EU association agreements accelerate growth; but show that this is far from evenly distributed across spacewith denser, larger and more diversified regional economies gaining the most. We discuss what these findings imply for regional growth and spatial imbalances in the new wave of associated countries under the ENP.

The geography of trade relations between the EU and the ENP countries: Empirical analysis and implications for theory and policy-making January 2013 OBJECTIVE OF RESEARCH Even though the ENP is distinct from the process of EU enlargement, the ENP countries operate under conditions of "neighborhood Europeanization". This indicates a misfit (i.e. the so-called "capabilities-expectations" gap) between ENP demands (i.e. demands that do not differ much from those of "accession Europeanization"), on the one hand, and ENP rewards (i.e. the possibility of EU membership has been ruled out for the majority of ENP countries), on the other. Given this misfit-and the concomitant scepticism about the ENP capacity to transfer EU values and rules to the neighboring countriesdeep(er) economic (in particular, trade) integration between the EU countries and the ENP countries is considered to be a catalyst for the success of the ENP undertaking. Considering (trade) integration as a proper proxy for the evaluation of the success of the ENP undertaking, the objective of the paper is to study the geography (i.e. the size, the composition and the direction) of trade relations (i.e. imports and exports flows) between the EU and the ENP countries

This research addresses the effects on regional employment growth in Greece of both trade and specialization. In doing so it follows Markusen et al (1991) in applying a trade-adjusted shift share analysis. The effect of specialization is dealt with an extended econometric shift-share analysis. The results obtained indicate that international trade had a disparate effect on regional employment growth whereas specialization had a negative effect.

The paper investigates the impact of trade relations among the European Union (EU) 7 and the European Neighborhood Policy countries, the ENPCs, on the economic performance of the latter. The analysis uses panel data for 14 ENPCs over the period 2000-2011 and recently developed panel cointegration techniques. The results of the analysis indicate that the effects of trade integration with the EU on ENPCs growth performance may depend on the development gap between trade partners. Deeper trade integration with the higher-income EU countries is found to have a negative impact on the growth performance of the ENPCs. In contrast, deeper trade integration with the middle-and lower-income EU countries is found to have a positive growth impact. The findings of the paper highlight the limits of integration among unequal partners, but also the need for a geographically more balanced pattern of trade relations that will improve growth prospects in the external and internal EU periphery.

In 2004, the EU launched the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), a unified policy framework towards its neighbours in the external EU periphery, aiming at strengthening prosperity, stability and security around its geopolitical borders. However, in-depth empirical analysis provides clear-cut evidence that, while the size and composition of trade flows between the EU and the ENCs may be growing, they are not favourable for the ENCs from the perspective of export diversification, in terms of either products or number of destinations. This condition increases their exposure to volatility in international markets. These results provide valuable insight into economic integration theory and for policymaking.

The paper explores the spatial dynamics in the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) countries, in a period of significant transformations in their internal and external economic environment. Regional disparities are reported to be the net outcome of two opposite dynamics: a pro-cyclical pattern, on the one hand, with dynamic and developed regions growing faster in periods of expansion and slower in periods of recession, and a long-term spread effect, on the other, partly offsetting the cumulative impact of growth on space after some critical level of development. In this framework, expanding trade relations with the European Union advanced countries may be an additional source of spatially unbalanced growth and polarization for the ENP countries, as the costs and benefits of integration prove to be unevenly allocated in space. To the extent that growth and integration dynamics tend to polarize the ENP economic space, a set of critical policy questions arise.

The perspective of the Balkan countries' integration in the economic and political space of the enlarged EU necessitates the unification of the Balkan space, through the unification of the areas' spatial development axes. This fact is of major significance since the economic integration process in the Balkans does not have a discrete spatial dimension, phenomenon being in contrast to the respective one that takes place in Western Europe. This absence derives from political and historical reasons and is enforced by the creation of social diversifications in the Balkan countries' internal environment. Furthermore, the implemented policies, especially in the last 15 years, have proved to be incompatible to the solution of the spatial integration problem. The purpose of this article is to investigate the level of the areas' spatial integration process, to audit the main problems of this process and to propose specific development policies in order to confront these problems.

The main purpose of this article is to investigate the relation between cities' economic development (local level) and regions' competitiveness (regional level) in the region of Thessaly, Greece (the Larissa-Volos dipole case-study). The last fifteen years almost fifty non-local enterprises have established new plants or have expanded their business activities to Thessaly region and especially around the cities of Larissa and Volos (eastern Thessaly). The first issue that this article investigates concerns the reasons for this agglomeration. The second issue has to do with the contribution of enterprises to the cities' development and to the region's competitiveness as a whole. The third issue concerns enterprises' decision analysis process to establish business activities in Thessaly region and the role of place marketing policies supporting this decision. Finally the article provides suggestions and particular development strategies for the strengthening of the Thessaly region's competitiveness through the economic development of the Larissa-Volos dipole.

Although EU association agreements are generally seen as welfare-improving, relatively little is known about their spatial-distributional consequences. Drawing on the preaccession experience of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), this paper estimates the regional growth effects of such agreements using an event-analysis approach. It finds a positive growth effect which is however not constant across association phases or types of regions (e.g., specialised regions gained most in the early association period and service-oriented economies gained most near accession); and it discusses the implications of this in relation to debates on regional growth in CEE and for future waves of association.