We discuss regional disparities in economic performance and living standards. first set out some key facts, provide a conceptual framework to help analyze whether such are efficient, or instead reflect market and/or policy failures. examine attempts reduce necessarily involve trade-off between equity efficiency. then investigate policymakers should focus on boosting the of lagging regions—or, c...

In EU countries, knowledge on spatial disparities in overall price level is extremely scarce. When interregional price disparities are large, however, nominal income measures fail to assess prosperity and the catch-up processes of regions. Despite its importance for regional policy, no official regional price statistic is available as a standard. On account of this gap, this paper deals with th...

Economic disparities between the regions of the European Union are of constant concern both for policy and economic research. In this paper we examine whether there are overlapping trends of regional development in the EU: overall convergence on the one hand and persistent or even increasing spatial concentration (agglomeration) on the other. Kernel density estimation, Markov chain analysis and...

Empirical evidence suggests that regional disparities in incomes are often very high, that these disparities do not necessarily disappear as economies grow and that these disparities are itself an important driver of growth. We use a novel approach based on multilevel modeling to decompose the sources of spatial disparities in incomes among households in Burkina Faso. We show that spatial dispa...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse Croatia's potential to integrate the concept of polycentric development – an even development of equally spaced urban centres which also aims at lessening regional disparities – into its regional development policy. By applying the polycentricity index to the Croatian data, following Meijers and Sandberg's methodological approach (2006), Croatia is found ...

introduction: the aim of the present study is to show regional disparities in iran through measurement of the level of development of different provinces with respect to their accessibility to the health and medicare facilities. methods: to accomplish the above mentioned purpose, data regarding 18 health and medicare indexes for the years 2006-2008, have been collected. the quantified methods s...

This paper applies nonparametric techniques to examine the evolution of the entire distribution of regional productivity in the European Union between 1977 and 1999. Likewise, we study the strength of the respective roles played by regional and sectoral factors in the convergence of productivity observed in the European context. To achieve this aim, we consider a new methodology involving a mod...