Do innovation and human capital actually narrow the technology gap? Champions and laggards of European regional productive performance

This paper studies regional productive performance differentials among 243 NUTS-2 European regions for the period 2003–11. Within last two decades technology gap between has increased considerably. Building on previous that have used data envelopment analysis (DEA) and which neglected national production structures pre-existing technological heterogeneity, we examine differences in by using a meta-frontier framework. Our findings confirm significant across large North–South gap. A panel vector autoregression (PVAR) shows this can be attributed to human capital innovation activity.