Regional Studies

Credit, Kevin; Kekezi, Orsa; Mellander, Charlotta; Florida, Richard

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2297083pmid: N/A

Urban ‘third places’ foster informal interactions and face-to-face contact that is critical to the development of new innovations and start-up businesses. Our research utilises extensive microdata in combination with telephone interviews with over 200 start-up companies in Stockholm, Sweden. Our findings indicate that access to third places has a significant impact on the number of new high-tech start-ups (both by entrepreneur place of residence and work) in their vicinity. This suggests that third places play a demonstrable role in innovation and economic growth.

Bassens, David; Pažitka, Vladimír; Hendrikse, Reijer

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2024.2391483pmid: N/A

Witnessing the inroads of big tech into finance, this paper maps the growing dependence of incumbent banks on public cloud infrastructures. Although ‘cloud interfacing’ has become crucial amid platform finance, the intersections between what we conceptualise as global digital technology networks and global financial networks have received little attention. We mobilise social network analysis to map: (1) the geographically variegated patterns of public cloud adoption in banking and their geopolitical implications; (2) the corporate networks supporting banks’ cloud migration; and (3) the urban networks of command and control undergirding cloud banking, connecting established financial centres with tech valleys old and new.

Daams, Michiel N.; McCann, Philip; Veneri, Paolo; Barkham, Richard

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2024.2398620pmid: N/A

This paper uses uniquely detailed large-scale commercial real estate investment data to examine how financial markets perceived the attractiveness of investing in UK regions during the last two decades. Our analysis demonstrates that prior to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis all regions of the UK were perceived similarly in terms of risks, whereas the crisis engendered a flight to safety of capital into London. Other UK regions shifted rapidly into junk bond territory, and have remained there ever since. These asymmetric capital shocks led up to a profound and adverse shift in the subsequent productivity growth of the UK regional economies.

Seri, Paolo; Compagnucci, Lorenzo

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2299282pmid: N/A

This paper is the first to present a long-term retrospective overview of the impact of Italian university satellite campuses (SCs), since Decree n. 509 of 1999 fostered a massive increase in the number of SCs, even in small municipalities around 10,000 residents. By drawing on a novel panel dataset aggregated at the urban level for the period 2000–20, findings show that SCs increased the number of graduates at the regional level. However, SCs alone have uneven effects on population trends and income at the urban level. They should be periodically reviewed and redesigned to address structural changes and local development.

Cortinovis, N.; Zhang, D.; Boschma, R.

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2024.2319339pmid: N/A

The literature has shown that related diversification in more complex industries enhances economic growth in regions but also inter-regional inequality. However, it has drawn little attention to the relationship between industrial dynamics (i.e., the rise and fall of industries) and intra-regional wage inequality. This explorative study examines the relationship between industry dynamics and wage inequality in NUTS-3 regions in the Netherlands in the period 2010–2019. Our study shows that related diversification in less complex industries tends to reduce wage inequality within a region. This implies it remains a policy challenge to combine smart and inclusive growth in regions. Our study also showed that there is no significant relationship between the exit of industries and regional inequality, with one exception: unrelated low-complex exits tend to increase intra-regional wage inequality. Overall, these findings suggest that related diversification in less complex industries tends to bring benefits in terms of inclusive growth, while unrelated exits in less complex industries tend to do the opposite.

Elekes, Zoltán; Tóth, Gergő; Eriksson, Rikard

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2024.2355993pmid: N/A

This paper explores how the network structure of local inter-industry labour flows relates to regional economic resilience across 72 local labour markets in Sweden. Drawing on recent advancements in network science, we stress test these networks against the sequential elimination of their nodes, finding substantial heterogeneity in network robustness across regions. Regression analysis with least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) in the context of the 2008 financial crisis indicates that labour flow network robustness is a prominent structural predictor of employment change during crisis. These findings elaborate on how variation in the self-organisation of regional economies as complex systems makes for more or less resilient regions.

Phelps, Peter; Spencer, David

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2024.2393672pmid: N/A

The re-emergence of industry – a process known as ‘reindustrialisation’ – has been widely acknowledged, especially in the United States and Europe. However, there are unanswered questions about the extent of any recent industrial revival in the UK. We present new evidence on reindustrialisation within and across UK regions. Our measures of reindustrialisation reveal that most regions outside London have reindustrialised to some extent. Furthermore, we explore regional reindustrialisation-growth patterns within the context of the UK’s longstanding spatial divide in productivity. Our results highlight that manufacturing can still be a dynamic force in the UK economy when supported by appropriate regional policies.

Capello, Roberta; Cerisola, Silvia

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2024.2358836pmid: N/A

The theorised reorganisation of global value chains (GVCs) during crises periods and the European Union advocating for a relaunch of manufacturing activities in favour of jobs creation bring about the crucial question whether a relaunch of manufacturing employment via backshoring in Europe takes place with an intensity large enough to be captured by aggregate statistics. Defining backshoring as a process according to which production of a region uses again a greater share of domestic relative to foreign inputs, the paper operationalises the definition using suitable indicators at the NUTS-2 level and tests the relationship between backshoring and regional manufacturing employment dynamics.

Grandclement, Antoine; Halbert, Ludovic; Adisson, Félix; Lasserre-Bigorry, Vincent; Navarre, Françoise

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2023.2293984pmid: N/A

The literature acknowledges the variety of local austerity policies, but has paid less attention to their geographical diversity. This paper questions the theorisation of space in this literature and investigates the relationships between local austerity policies and the diversity of local spatial systems. By combining two fiscal and socio-economic classifications of French municipalities, it provides a comprehensive and fine-grained mapping of local austerity for an entire country. Our findings demonstrate that austerity occurs in a wide range of local spatial systems and highlight numerous instances of mundane austerity that exist between affluent areas and those most severely impacted by austerity.

de Queiroz Stein, Alexandre; Britto, Gustavo; Medeiros, Victor

doi: 10.1080/00343404.2024.2411345pmid: N/A

The paper presents an original application of economic complexity to the agricultural sector aiming to determine its suitability to measure and depict regional structural inequalities across Brazilian regions. Using census data, we calculate agricultural complexity indexes for products (PCI-Agro) and regions (ECI-Agro) and the agricultural product space. We show that higher PCI-Agro is associated with higher levels of productivity, education, income and human development. Also, we found that ECI-Agro is associated with higher productivity in agriculture. The econometric evidence points to an inverted ‘U’-shape curve relationship between ECI-Agro and agricultural productivity, which has significant policy implications.