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Examines regional variations in house prices and the rate of house price inflation over the last 20 years. Shows the existence of marked cyclical variations and argues that the frequent downturn of house prices in the South East of England was predictable and will lead to a reduction in the North/South house price divide.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the approaches to smart specialisation being adopted in different European Union (EU) regions are likely to be heavily shaped by the institutional and governance context, as well as the regional economic specifics. Along with the specific regional economic characteristics, these institutional variations mean that there is no single smart specialisation template or blueprint which can be transplanted onto every region. Rather, regions have to work within their own governance frameworks to find their best solutions.

As evidence of this, the authors analyse the possibilities and challenges faced by four different sets of regional examples in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. Using OECD, EU and other official national documents and publications, the authors are able to explain the ways in which the governance set-ups vary enormously across these different arenas although they do share some certain common features with the other examples on a case-by-case basis.

The policy architecture within which the smart specialisation agenda will be operating is very different in each national or regional case. As such, in addition to the regional economic specifics, the smart specialisation challenges faced by different regions are likely to differ significantly due to governance issues as well as variations in the regional economic conditions. This is because the possibilities for different regional actions depend heavily on the governance relationship between the regional and the local governance remits.

The argument presented here are necessarily in part speculative in that while they are based on a regional systems-of-innovation conceptual framework which links institutions, innovation and regional development, the actual smart specialisation implementation processes are still in their infancy, so that the actual outcomes remain to be seen in the long run.

The analysis here helps to situate smart specialisation discussions in the national-regional institutional and governance context. This also serves to frame how smart specialisation priority-setting processes are likely to be undertaken and helps to consider how such activities may play out in other regions with different institutional settings.

This is one of the few papers that explicitly examine specialisation issues in a governance and institutional setting. In reality, the success or otherwise of smart specialisation agenda will be heavily shaped by how the governance and institutional issues are addressed. Good analysis and data gathering is essential, but good governance for policy design, monitoring and evaluation can potentially also provide a crucial advantage to smart specialisation actions. In contrast, poor governance may undermine good smart specialisation intentions and analyses.

Ensuring adequate access to food to all has remained a major challenge of the 21^st century. To aid the effort of hunger alleviation, many studies have quantified the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU), mostly at the national level. There has been limited attention to understanding the intra-country variation in undernourishment estimates.

Unlike past studies, this study tracks the substantial regional heterogeneity in the undernourishment status within Nepal. Employing Food and Agriculture Organization's methodology and Nepal Living Standards Survey data from 1995, 2003 and 2011, household energy consumption and requirements are computed to determine regional undernourishment.

Nepal's PoU declined between 1995 and 2003 but increased after 2003 affecting approximately 7.6 million Nepalese in 2011. The Terai domain – Provinces 2 and 5 – are found to be the most vulnerable to undernourishment concerns likely because of economic and natural shocks. Province 4 achieved higher progress in alleviating undernourishment during 2003, but its PoU doubled in 2011 (as in Province 6).

By examining where and how many are undernourished within Nepal, this study has provided a more accurate picture of the PoU for better-targeting assistance to improve the livelihood of its citizens.

Past studies indicate substantial variation in food access and PoU within Nepal. While they provide some answers to “where and how many” questions for some districts, provinces, belts and urban/rural domains at the cross-sectional level (or for selected locales), few have examined intra-Nepal heterogeneity, especially over time. Therefore, this study explores where and how many within Nepal have been undernourished during the past three decades.

Regional disparities in China have recently attracted the attention of economists both inside and outside China. In particular, researchers and policy makers are concerned with how economic reforms have affected regional disparities in China. As a result, there has been a boom in the literature. However, the exploding literature has so far presented conflicting results. The aim of this paper is to review the literature in this field and to present new evidence on income disparities in China’s regional economies. This study is based on the application of regional GDP figures covering the period of 1953‐1997. It attempts to assess and consolidate the findings from previous studies and hence contributes to the current debate.

With a view to the unconventional monetary policy measures implemented in the euro area in recent years, this study aims to investigate whether the recent house price increases in Germany are signals of an incipient overheating of the German housing market.

This paper presents a valuation measure for residential property based on a large and exhaustive regional panel data set for Germany. The fitted house prices from a panel regression at the district level, taking into account spatial spillovers, are taken as a measure of the fundamental equilibrium house prices, which can be aggregated for various regional subsets.

The estimation results suggest that apartment prices over the past years substantially exceeded the fundamental price suggested by the model, in particular in the big cities. Single-family houses appear to be markedly overvalued mainly in the cities. The low level of interest rates in recent years appears to have contributed to the emergence of misalignments.

Exploiting the variation across local housing markets, the estimation approach provides value-add for the estimation of house price valuation results in various regional subsets, as conventional time-series approaches to valuing property are subject to severe data limitations in the case of Germany.

The purpose of this study is to examine the subnational regional dimension of exports by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in India, one of the prominent emerging economies or “rising powers”.

To understand the forces driving the variation in subnational region’s share in international business of rising power SMEs, an analytical conceptual framework on regional export advantage (REA) was formulated based on the review of relevant theoretical and empirical literature. The model was estimated for Indian states using the most appropriate and recently developed econometric technique of fractional logit model.

The paper provides evidence that the emergence of exports by rising Indian power SMEs is geographically limited to a few select regions/states. Southern Indian states alone accounted for half of exports from SMEs in the organized manufacturing sector during 2000-2008, followed by Western India. The REA analysis has brought to the fore that regional stock of technological knowledge, availability of skill, port facilities, urban areas and foreign direct investment stocks are crucial factors determining states’ share in SME exports across technological subcategories. However, the size and sophistication of local demand continue to influence states’ efforts at enhancing exports by SMEs, at least those belonging to the medium- and high-technology categories.

The proposed empirical framework could be extended to include institutional and political economy factors. Its application to subnational regional shares in total exports by all firms taking into account fixed effects for regions may be another feasible line of future research.

Empirical findings recognize that appropriate strategies by subnational policymakers are important for a region to achieve a higher contribution in national SME exports. Subnational policy measures aimed at upgradation of regional technological assets and skill base through the promotion of technology clusters and R & D of local firms, facilitation and creation of better industry-university linkages and investments in education and training institution may help the states to gain higher export advantage.

This paper provides new analytics and insights into the role of subnational spaces in the internationalization of rising power SMEs from India and serves to contribute to the extant international business research that is predominantly occupied with “nation” as the unit of location.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate experimentation over time in Ontario, Canada with place-based innovation policies to support the development and coordination of entrepreneurial ecosystems on a regional basis across the province.

Tracing the policy learning process and successive adaptations in program design over time, the authors provide a detailed case study of the evolution of the Ontario Network of Entrepreneurs (ONE) from 2003 to the present.

The authors find that the program has evolved in response to regular program reviews that include broad input from ecosystem actors operating at multiple levels within the network, and that intermediaries are key facilitators of inter- and intra-ecosystem linkages. However, program complexity and coordination challenges suggest that place-based innovation policies, such as the ONE, should focus specifically on innovation-intensive entrepreneurship.

These findings make three contributions to the theory and practice of place-based innovation policy. First, these policies are by nature experimental because they must be able to flexibly adapt according to policy learning and practitioner input from a wide variety of local contexts. Second, multilevel interactions between provincial policymakers and regional ecosystem actors indicate that place-based innovation policy is neither entirely driven by “top down” policy, nor “bottom up” networks but is rather a complex and variable “hybrid” blend of the two. Finally, publicly funded intermediaries perform essential inter- and intra-ecosystem connective functions but system fragmentation and “mission creep” remain enduring policy challenges.

The paper makes an original contribution to the literature by analyzing the development of entrepreneurial policy support framework and situating the case study in the context of the policy learning process involved in place-based innovation policymaking in North America.

This study aims to examine the differences within individuals and clusters in nutritional status and identify socioeconomic factors in the nutritional status of under-five children in Ethiopia.

A weighted sub-sample of 5,270 under-five children was drawn from the under-five children data set of the Ethiopian 2019 Mini Demographic and Health Survey. Multilevel modeling was used to look at the association between the nutritional status of children with predictors.

The proportion of stunting, underweight and wasting among under-five children were 39.3%, 28.6% and 16.3%, respectively. The observed Global Moran Index’s value for child malnutrition (stunting, wasting and underweight) prevalence in Ethiopia were I = 0.204 for stunting, I = 0.152 for wasting and I = 0.195 for underweight at p = 0.000 was statistically significant indicating that spatial variability of malnutrition of under-five children across survey clusters and regions was observed. Moreover, the result of heterogeneity between clusters obtained for stunting, underweight and wasting was significant providing evidence of variation among regional clusters concerning the status of nutrition of under-five children. Child’s age in months, breastfeeding, family educational level, wealth index, place of residence, media access and region were highly significantly associated with childhood malnutrition. The inclusion of the explanatory variables has shown a significant impact on the variation in malnutrition among regions.

Enhance education, expanding the activities regarding nutritional and health services using media, health extension workers, and health institutions.

The study provides the malnutrition situation status of Ethiopian country when the survey carried out.

This paper aims to use Markov switching vector auto regression (MSVAR) methods to examine UK house price cycles in UK regions at NUTS1 level. There is extensive literature on UK regional house price dynamics, yet empirical work focusing on the duration and magnitude of regional housing cycles has received little attention. The research findings indicate that the regional structure of UK exhibits that UK house price changes are best described as two large groups of regions with marked differences in the amplitude and duration of the cyclical regimes between the two groups.

MSVAR principal component analysis NUTS1 data are used.

The housing cycles can be divided into two super regions based on magnitude, duration and the way they behave during recession, boom and sluggish periods. A north-south divide, a uniform housing policy and a monetary policy increase the diversion among the regions.

Markov switching needs high-frequency data and long time spans.

Questions a uniform housing policy in a heterogeneous housing market. Questions the impact of monetary policy on a heterogeneous housing market. The way the recovery of the housing market varies among regions depends on regional economic performance, housing market structure and the labour market. House price convergence, beta-convergence.

No such work has been done looking at duration and magnitude of regional housing cycles. A new econometric method was used.

We consider whether there has been a gradual decoupling of the Australian business cycle from its trading partners in Europe and North America and a closer convergence toward its trading partners in Asia. We set up a dynamic latent factor model to estimate common dynamic components or factors for the real GDP growth rate of 19 countries. From variance decomposition over the 1991–2009 sample, we find that a global factor contributed the most in explaining Australian output growth variations, followed by a European factor, an Asian factor, and finally a North American factor. However, the correlation between Australian output growth movements and the Asian business cycle factor evolved from negative and small to positive and large after 2002. The European and North American factors were negatively correlated with Australian output growth for most of the sample period before turning positive in the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. This evidence supports the hypothesis that the Australian economy has decoupled to some extent from Europe, was not much coupled with North America except insofar as the United States drove the global factor, and has increasingly become positively coupled with Asia.