Search results

“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between culture and entrepreneurial activity at both the national and regional levels of analyses. While there has been significant progress in investigating the effects of culture on entrepreneurial activity, most work overlooks the effects that time-orientation may have on national or regional entrepreneurial activity. Specifically, this study argues for the connection between long-term orientation (LTO) and subsequent levels of entrepreneurship such that the more a nation or region is long-term oriented, the higher the subsequent entrepreneurial activity will be.

Data from the World Value Survey (WVS), which is a global project that measures individuals’ values across 62 countries (World Value Survey, 2011), were used for this project. The final sample consisted of 36,652 individual observations across 29 nations and 262 regions and was analyzed using ecological factor analyses and multilevel modeling.

The findings suggest that LTO as a cultural dimension does influence entrepreneurship activity levels. The findings also suggest that the effects of LTO at the regional and national levels vary widely. Specifically, the authors find LTO to be positively related to entrepreneurship at the regional, but not national, level of analysis.

The findings reveal important nuances about the implications that the understudied cultural factor of LTO has on entrepreneurial activity across multiple levels of analysis.

The unequal distribution of economic activities, transposed in economic, social and territorial disparities is the general characteristic of the European economy. Gaps increased in the context of European Union (EU) enlargement towards Eastern and Central Europe and of the economic crisis, thus bringing new differentiations among member states’ economies. The main aim of the chapter is to emphasise the centre-periphery differentiations in the European economy, by using a composite index of peripherality, in order to better understand the determinants of growth and convergence in Central and Eastern European countries and to reach normative conclusions for increasing Cohesion Policy (CP) effectiveness. The first part of the chapter provides a short overview of the main theories and models of the peripherality analysis and the relationships between the centre and the periphery, in order to find out how this analysis relates to the research in the field. The second part provides a comparative analysis of the evolution of European economies during 2003–2014, in order to find out whether the EU enlargement process stabilised the EU core-periphery pattern or, on the contrary, the process of core-periphery structural convergence occurred. The third part includes the suggested model of analysis (methodology, data, and main results) from a multidisciplinary perspective, underlining the centre-periphery differentiations on the two axes, North–South and West–East. The results have been interpreted in conclusions, with a focus on their relevance for the European CP challenges.

This chapter describes the scenario technique used for the integrative methodological approach (IMA) of the German global change project GLOWA Elbe. It is outlined how regional scenarios are systematically derived to analyze water use conflicts and their resolution in the context of global change for the German Elbe river basin. Through the combination of frameworks of development and policy strategies a consistent set of developmental scenarios can be generated that makes it possible to examine the regional impact of policy strategies under conditions of different future global change development paths. The scenario analysis of the framework of development starts on the global level with qualitative IPCC storylines, translates them to the regional level, and quantifies their regional effects by means of modeling and statistical estimation methods. The policy strategies are derived in close cooperation with regional stakeholders.

This study examines dynamics of global and regional financial market efficiency; and how specific features of the market and other conditions influence variability in such efficiency.

The study employs fixed effects statistical approach in its examination of how specific features of financial markets influence variability in its efficiency.

This study finds that individual IMF defined economic regions tend to exhibits significantly different financial market efficiency characteristics given specific market features and conditions. In regional level comparative analysis (e.g. Europe, Africa, Asia–Pacific etc.) this study finds that incidence of financial market uncertainty is the dominant condition with significant effect on financial market efficiency across all the IMF regions. In the global level analysis, empirical estimates presented suggest that financial market uncertainty, financial institutional depth and financial institutional efficiency tend to have significant positive influence on global financial market efficiency all things being equal. In the same analysis however, this study finds that financial market and financial institutional access growth has significant negative impact on financial market efficiency.

The uniqueness of this study compared to related ones found in the literature stems from its focus on financial market efficiency at the global, and IMF defined regional block level instead of on a specific economy as often found in the literature. Additionally, in contrast to other related studies, this study further examines the role of global financial market uncertainty in its financial market efficiency analysis. Financial market uncertainty variable may be unique to this study because the variable is derived through an econometric process from a base variable.

Besides subjectivism (in terms of value and cost) and the market process approach (as opposed to mainstream economics’ equilibrium analysis), methodological individualism is a foundational methodological principle of Austrian economics. While being (arguably) more consistently and consciously practiced within Austrian economics, methodological individualism is far from unique to this tradition and is a well-recognized principle of inquiry in the social sciences (Watkins, 1952a, 1952b). Needless to say though, methodological individualism remains controversial and discussions of its true meaning and adequateness periodically resurface in the philosophy of science literature (Hodgson, 2007; Udehn, 2002).

The purpose of this paper is to find out the characteristics and evolutionary trends of China’s inter-regional innovation correlation network, the status and roles of each province in China’s inter-regional innovation correlation network and the influencing factors of China’s inter-regional innovation correlation effect.

Based on the patent data of 30 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) in China from 1991 to 2017, social network analysis was used to find out the characteristics and evolutionary trends of China’s inter-regional innovation correlation network and the status and roles of each province in China’s inter-regional innovation correlation network. Furthermore, the QAP method was used to find out the influencing factors of China’s inter-regional innovation correlation effect.

China’s inter-regional innovation correlation is becoming increasingly close and inter-regional innovation correlation network is becoming increasingly stable. Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and other eastern coastal provinces are at the core in the inter-regional innovation correlation network, while the western regions are marginal actors. China’s regional innovation development territory can be divided into four blocks, namely, “bidirectional spillover block,” “net spillover block,” “main beneficial block” and “net beneficial block,” and gradient transfer mechanism is obvious between the blocks. The geographical adjacency and similarity in regional industrial structure, urbanization level and government attention degree have significant positive effect on China’s inter-regional innovation correlation effects.

This paper only uses patent application as a measure of regional innovation level to analyze inter-regional innovation correlation effect. Meanwhile, this paper carries out an empirical study only from the provincial level and not from the city level.

This paper provides the practical basis for further promoting the coordinated development of regional innovation and promoting the construction of regional innovation systems with different characteristics.

This paper contributes to understand the status and role of each province in inter-regional innovation correlation network. Meanwhile, this paper also helps to understand the influence of the proximity and external environmental factors on inter-regional innovation correlation effect.

Sustainability performance in higher education is often evaluated at a generalized large scale. It remains unknown to what extent campus efforts address regional sustainability needs. This study begins to address this gap by evaluating trends in performance through the lens of regional environmental characteristics.

Four sustainability metrics across 300 North American institutions are analyzed between 2005 and 2014. The study applies two established regional frameworks to group and assess the institutions: Commission on Environmental Cooperation Ecoregions and WaterStat (water scarcity status). Standard t-tests were used to assess significant differences between the groupings of institutions as compared to the North American study population as a whole.

Results indicate that all institutions perform statistically uniformly for most variables when grouped at the broadest (Level I) ecoregional scale. One exception is the Marine West Coast Forest ecoregion where institutions outperformed the North American average for several variables. Only when institutions are grouped at a smaller scale of (Level III) ecoregions do the majority of significant performance patterns emerge.

This paper demonstrates an ecoregions-based analytical approach to evaluating sustainability performance that contrasts with common evaluation methods in the implementation field. This research also identifies a gap in the literature explicitly linking ecological sub-regions with their associated environmental challenges and identifies next research steps in developing defensible regional targets for applied sustainability efforts.

The practical implications of this research include the following: substantive changes to methodologies for rating sustainability leadership and performance, a framework that incentivizes institutions to frame sustainability efforts in terms of collaborative or collective impact, a framework within which institutions can meaningfully prioritize efforts, and a potential shift toward regional impact metrics rather than those focused solely on campus-based or generalized targets.

The authors believe this to be the first effort to analyze North American higher education sustainability performance using regional frameworks.

This paper aims to conduct a longitudinal analysis of the patterns of internationalisation of multinational corporations and provide a measure of their degree of globalisation at the firm-level. There is much debate in the literature on the regional nature of the globalisation of multinational corporations (Rugman and Oh, 2013).

The authors use firm-level sales data to analyse the location of sales and patterns of globalisation of 1,276 companies across ten countries and ten industries from 1998-2012.

The results show that while international sales are rising and the proportion of home region-oriented firms is falling, the majority of sales of the companies in our data set continues to be in the Triad, with little growth in non-Triad regions. The authors find one common theme for the majority of countries, an increase in sales to Asia yet concentrated in just four industries, financials, basic materials, oil and gas and technology. Despite an increase in the percentage of host-region, bi-regional and global companies, 62.6 per cent of the firms have not changed multinational classification over the 15-year period, 43.1 per cent have not expanded out of their home region and 16.4 per cent have not expanded out of their home market. The authors find some evidence of liabilities of interregional foreignness at the industry and country level. The authors show regional sales are moving towards matching global economic activity for the 50 most globalised firms in our study but less so for the other firms in our sample. Overall, the results show that the majority of the growth in internationalisation comes from a small minority of firms.

The authors make several advances across the literature on internationalisation, including a more in-depth longitudinal analysis of firm-level multinationality than exists to date and a novel method of measuring firm-level globalisation.