POLICIES FOR THE LOCATION OF INDUSTRIAL DISTRICTS IN ITALY AND

Recent global trends have affected significantly territorial and economic policies, especially in advanced-economy democracies, weakening frequently their national sovereignty. This paper, through published data, documentary sources, and interviews, offers a comparative perspective of industrial localisation’s policies in Israel and Italy, focusing on the dualism national decision-making/local practice. Although they have two different political structures, both countries have shifted to greater decentralisation, increased deregulation, and more privatisation. Since the beginning of the State, Israel industrial localisation policy used tools as national and regional planning and fiscal incentives, with the objective of the industrial dispersal. But last years’ profound economic, political, and social changes have led to a transformation of Israeli industrial geography, shifting changes in the government policies, and reinforcing the local-government assertiveness. Developing industrial parks has become a top priority even for rural regional council, with the risk of over-investment in too many industrial parks of too small a size. Similarly, since post-war years Italy concentrated on regenerating the economic periphery, the southern regions, through the “Cassa per il Mezzogiorno”, helping finance and developing irrigation, agriculture and industrial development in the most disadvantaged areas with a policy of investments in infrastructures and financial supports to the localisation of large firms. The change of industrial models, now based on more flexible structures, has brought, almost spontaneously, the “Third Italy” phenomenon, a proliferation of ‘local production systems’ (LPS) where SMEs represent an high share of total employment. Based on an endogenous development model, the success of LPS is not guaranteed unless change and innovation take place among local SMEs and institutions and between the local production system and the external environment, competing areas and other spatial system. For both countries is necessary a comprehensive, strategic and flexible planning and a stable, efficient and no-bureaucratic decision-making process, at an intermediate scale between regional and local.

An Impact Evaluation of the Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme 2014-2020 : Final Report

The aim of the report is to assess the contribution of the four programme priority axes of the 2014-20 Northern Periphery and Arctic (NPA) Programme to their objectives and the contribution to implementation of the horizontal priorities. The Programme has achieved a strong start to the 2014- 20 period although it is still at an early stage for measuring impact. An assessment of mediumlonger terms impacts from the past programme period shows a positive picture of impact sustainability with improved access to services being one of the key strengths. Area experiences of project impact vary, with place-specific factors (including type of partner, partner roles and domestic frameworks) conditioning impact. Detailed case studies are used to establish, for each Specific Objective, the causal link between project results and observed development in the programme area. A range of impacts can be established including: new SME links to R&D institutes/public sector supporting economic development; new business growth opportunities; improved service provision to remote communities; changing attitudes and perceptions; future oriented strategic partnerships and transnational links; and growing local capacity to engage with macro development issues

Evaluating Public Policy Formation and Support Mechanisms for Technological Innovation

Policy evaluation is a complex task. Most approaches now adopt a mixed method approach combining both quantitative and qualitative techniques. A shortcoming of the standard approaches is that they fail to measure or investigate deeper perceptions of the policy. In this paper the usefulness of projective techniques as a tool for policy evaluation is investigated. Projective techniques are widely used in psychology and consumer studies but their usefulness in policy evaluation has still to be assessed. A simple evaluation is done in this paper by reporting on a study of owner-managers of tradeable-services small and medium size enterprises attitudes to Government e-business policy. The survey included firms from Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland and New Zealand. Traditional quantitative and qualitative survey techniques were used, however these failed to produce conclusive evidence. To overcome this limitation two projective techniques- word association and completion tests were employed as an additional evaluation method. The paper illustrates how the results of projective techniques can be analysed using both context and matrix analysis. Given that the area of e-business is dynamic and fast changing and that SMEs are extremely heterogeneous, it is argued that the application of projective techniques to assess their attitudes and perceptions of government policy is a good test of the usefulness of the method. The results of the projective techniques lead to more insight into the perceptions and attitudes of the owner-managers and provide interesting individual perspectives into the issues. Problems with the method, such as costs, the level of skill needed to apply the technique and generalization are highlighted. The overall conclusions are that projective techniques could provide an interesting additional tool for policy evaluation and that further assessment of its usefulness is needed.Policy evaluation; Projective techniques: E-business; SMEs

European Arctic Initiatives Compendium

Julkaistu versi

Northern Periphery Programme Preparatory Project - Arctic Collaboration Mechanism

This final report of the ‘Northern Periphery Programme Preparatory Project – Arctic Collaboration Mechanism’ details project progress and results to date and sets out the final steps for the project. The report draws on a synthesis of past project outputs and new research and consultation. The overall aims of the project are to consider the need for improved collaboration across regional economic development programmes in the Arctic and High North, and how a collaboration mechanism can be optimally structured and delivered

"Innovation-Productivity Paradox: Implications for Regional Policy" Background paper for the OECD-EC High-Level Expert Workshop series “Productivity Policy for Places”, March 3 and 5

The notion of innovation-productivity paradox refers to the co-existence of exciting new technological innovations (e.g., artificial intelligence, digitalisation, machine learning and robotics) and declining productivity rates in the 21st-century OECD economies. This paper explores the regional dimension of the paradox in question. It aims to distil a set of theory-informed policy implications grounded in key ‘areas of agreement’ among three relevant kinds of research: economic research on the global productivity slowdown, innovation paradoxes research, and regional innovation studies. Overall, the paper underscores that several critical causal factors of the global productivity slowdown are very likely to be operative at the subnational level rather than solely at the level of firms and nations; hence, the regional scale constitutes a fertile ground to design and implement place-based policies that could boost inclusive productivity growth in the COVID-19-riddled OECD economie

Benchmarking Regional Innovation: A Comparison of Bavaria, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland

Regional regeneration strategies based on developing innovation capability have received much support in recent years. Evaluation of the effectiveness of such initiatives has, however, been limited largely to an assessment of the impact of such strategies on policy frameworks and attitudes. Based on innovation survey data covering nearly a decade, this paper outlines a number of external innovation benchmarks for core and peripheral regions within the EU. The benchmarks considered cover the innovation objectives, constraints resources, linkages and outputs of manufacturing firms. Despite considerable efforts in recent years to develop the innovation capability and institutional support framework for innovation in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the benchmarks still point to a substantial performance gap between the Irish and German study regions and provide little evidence of convergence over the 1991-99 period. The benchmarks also suggest other more general points emphasising, for example, a general shortening of product lifecycles and a related shift towards more radical innovation. More disappointing is in that in each of the study regions the development of environmentally friendly products is given a low and diminishing priority by manufacturing firms.