The Effect of a Region's Location on It's Development

The sustainable development of a region depends on its power to attract industrial units. Industrial mobility, however, is largely a voluntary process. Hence, a region's growth or decline depends on its power to "pull" and "retain" industries but also the right blend of people to run them; this pulling power depends on what we call the Image of a region. At each time instant the region "sends out" its Image and depending on its impact on the people (both employers and employees) the region may be considered Attractive or Repulsive. The image of a region may be defined as a function of a multitude of factors physical, economic, social and environmental. One of those factors, ïn which our emphasis is placed in the present work, is the region's proximity to influence centers (markets, resources and decision centers). This proximity may be expressed through a variable, which is referred to as the region's Location Multiplier. As a first attempt to quantify this multiplier we may express it as a function of the region's distance and / or transportation cost to and from the main influence centers. Such an approach, although sound and realistic in most cases, has a serious shortcoming as it cannot take into account the problems of spatial discontinuity faced by remote and especially island regions. To overcome this problem we may extend the above function so as to include the region's spatial continuity dimension expressed by the availability in the region of all or only a number of the classic transportation modes. This new multiplier is clearly much improved as compared to the previous one, but still has a weakness, as it cannot take into account the opportunities offered to a remote region by the new Information and Communication Technologies. To alleviate this weakness we may extend the multiplier so as to include the information continuity dimension expressed by the availability in the region of the infrastructure required for the implementation of such technologies. Our objective in this paper is to define a region's Location Multiplier, going through the three stages described above, suggest ways of quantifying it and finally applying it to a number of regions in Greece, a country with many islands and thus having an intense spatial continuity problem but also a lot to gain from an information continuity situation

The impact of economic crisis on Greek regions and the importance of regional resilience

The global economic crisis of 2008 has affected all European countries; Greece of course could not be the exception to this "rule". First, the fact that Greece was unable to mitigate its public expenditures and to increase its revenues in comparison with the other European countries and other the weaknesses of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) design which led to a structural asymmetry within the Eurozone, contributed to Greece's "acquaintance" with the economic crisis. Its impact on Greek regions has become more intense during the last three years. Taking into consideration some indicators which are directly affiliated with the economic and social welfare, for example GDP, disposal income, employment/unemployment, population, infant mortality, proportion of pupils etc, before and after the crisis it is easily ascertained that the Greek regions are moved to unprecedented high rates of under-development. For instance, the most developed Greek region, Attica, which hadn't experienced before high rates of unemployment, now it is in the same class with regions that had traditionally high rates of unemployment. The goal of this paper is to examine the extent to which each region has been hit by the economic crisis -because each of them has been affected to different degree- using certain indicators which are presented minutely in the research. We do not focus our attention on some specific regions; instead of this we examine all regions whether they are developed or under-developed. Moreover, throughout this research we also pursue to investigate the regional disparities which induce to the differential impact of the crisis and which worsened due to the austerity measures that were applied. Regional disparities reflect permanent structural or macroeconomic imbalances in the production model of the country and the causes of their existence are geographical and environmental factors, the regions' social structure, the low mobility of labor and capital, institutional and political factors and external economies. Furthermore, this paper investigates the degree of resilience of each region during the crisis i.e. whether they can cope with it, overcome it and recover from it. In order to ascertain it we will examine if regions dispose resourcefulness, performance, redundancy, diversity, innovative learning, connectedness, robustness and rapidity. Finally, we will valuate the regional resilience and we will examine whether it is resistance, recovery, re-orientation or renewal (or resumption)

Prediction models and testing of resilience in regions: Covid19 economic impact in USA counties study case

A significant amount of research has been conducted regarding the resilience of the regions and the factors that contribute to allow them to face challenges, crises, or disasters. The rise of promising sectors like Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can enhance this research using computing power in regional economic, social, and environmental data analysis to find patterns and create prediction models. Through Machine Learning, the following research introduces the use of models that can predict the performance of a region in disasters. A case study of the performance of USA Counties during the Covid19 first wave period of the pandemic and the related restrictions that were applied by the authorities was used in order to reveal the obvious or hidden parameters and factors that affected their resilience, in particular their economic response, and other interesting patterns between all the involved attributes. This paper aims to contribute to a methodology and to offer useful guidelines in how regional factors can be translated and processed by data and ML/AI tools and techniques. The proposed models were evaluated on their ability to predict the economic performance of each county and in particular the difference of its unemployment rate between March and June of 2020. The former is based on several economic, social, and environmental data -up to that point in time- using classifiers like neural networks and decision trees. A comparison of the different models' execution was performed, and the best models were further analyzed and presented. Further execution results that identified patterns and connections between regional data and attributes are also presented. The main results of this research are i) a methodological framework of how regional status can be translated into digital models and ii) related examples of predictive models in a real case. An effort was also made to decode the results in terms of regional science to produce useful and meaningful conclusions, thus a decision tree is also presented to demonstrate how these models can be interpreted. Finally, the connection between this work and the strong current trend of regional and urban digitalization towards sustainability is established

European Regional Policy and Development in Greece: Do Statistics Justify the Investments?

The study presented in the paper attempts to examine if the alleged effectiveness of the developmental funds - one of the main strategic tools of the EU - can be traced in the typical statistics provided by various authorities and organizations. The study focuses in the case of funds used in Greece during a period of years and it tries to provide insight in the issue, based on statistical and empirical data analysis methodologies. Available information regarding European programmes and corresponding funds is charted and linked to relevant official statistical data provided by Greek national authorities and Eurostat. Selected sectoral and regional actions are analyzed based on an optimal match between funding objectives and official statistics. The results, both statistical and empirical, appear to support the argument: assessment of EU regional policy based on statistics does not seem to be a conclusive method of evaluation

Regional Development and Income Distribution The Case of Greece

The distribution of income has always been a main concern of economic theory and policy. Classical economists were concerned with the distribution of income between the main factors of production, land, labour and capital. Modern economists, on the other hand, are concerned with the distribution of income across individuals and households. Furthermore, the unequal distribution of personal income and wealth is one of the most prominent features of our society and one which has a profound effect on economic and social relationships. The theoretical aspects of income distribution and a number of income inequality measures have been presented in some previous work (Dimaki et al. 2001). In this paper we focus on income inequality at a regional level. Almost all countries face regional disparities, due to a variety of reasons, historic, socioeconomic, structural and geographic, leading to a number of adverse consequences for the less favored regions. Hence, Governments take certain alternative measures to alleviate those disparities and assist the less developed regions. Our objective in this paper is to: - Define a measure expressing a region's current state of development and future prospects. - Assess the changes in that measure over time, resulting from both endogenous development and the implementation of alternative state measures for its improvement. - Relate the changes in that measure to the respective changes in the regional income inequality measures over the same period of time. The theoretical findings will be applied to the case of Greek regions over a period of time and the results will be presented and critically discussed

Measuring regional inequalities in Greek tourism development

In recent times, the attention given to the importance of tourism as a particularly efficient way to promote regional development has significantly increased, owing to the capacity of tourism to create income and employment and to generate synergies within other economic sectors. Tourism is worldwide considered to have a key role in the economic development of regions, and therefore, is widely used to reduce regional disparities and to improve quality of life standards in local communities. Greece has a long tradition in tourism, mainly due to a gifted natural environment and rich cultural heritage. However, tourism development across regions is highly unbalanced. This is attributed particularly to the highly insular and mountainous geomorphology of the country, the uneven distribution of natural, socio-cultural and environmental resources, and the lack of appropriate regional and tourism development policies during the post war decades. The dominance of the mass tourism model adopted since the early seventies in the country and the extensive structural inefficiencies, are effectively hindering the existing potential for a balanced and viable tourism development. The main objective of this paper is to investigate tourism development disparities among Greek regions and to identify factors and occurring patterns that affect the tourism development of regions in order to formulate a strategy and policy framework for balanced regional tourism development. In the first section of this paper an overview of the theoretical approaches related to tourism and balanced regional development is provided. Next, the role of tourism in the Greek national economy and the country's position in the international tourism market are examined. Following an analysis of the evolution of regional tourism disparities in Greece during the last decades in the third section, quantitative techniques are used to assess intra- and cross-regional tourism inequalities in the fourth section. The results reveal the existence of strong regional disparities in tourism development among Greek regions, although the development pattern differs among different types of regions. Finally, in the last section some concluding remarks and policy recommendations are presented, leading to the identification of issues for further research

Alternative Ways of Overcoming a Region's Spatial Discontinuity

The development of regions and especially those facing spatial discontinuity has been the focus in some previous work (Angelis 1980, 1999) and the region's Image has been defined as a variable expressing its relative attractiveness and its prospects of future development. The findings have been applied to selected Greek regions and the results have been discussed. Among the factors affecting a region's Image, accessibility to markets, resources and influence centres, seems to be a very crucial one and its improvement will facilitate its development. Although several measures for improving a region's accessibility have been suggested, they seem to have little or no effect for regions with spatial discontinuity. In this case, alternative measures have been introduced and a modification of the initial region's Image concept has been proposed so as to take into account the variables related to those measures (Gaki, Angelis, Dimaki 2009). The use of the modified Image functions for regions with spatial discontinuity seems to be a step in the right direction since, on one hand, they give a better view of their current state of development and future prospects and, on the other hand, they may be used as the basis for the design, but also for the evaluation, of alternative specific measures aiming to assist them in overcoming their problem. One of the measures suggested for this purpose is the development of local business activities, i.e. activities basically using local resources and selling their products to local markets. For such activities discontinuity is not a handicap since their development doesn't require frequent transportation of physical entities to-and-from other regions. Our objective in this paper is to focus on this solution. Toward this end we: - Determine the characteristics that a region should have in order to implement such a solution - Redefine the Image function so as to include those characteristics - Apply the theoretical findings to selected Greek regions - Compare the findings with those obtained when the initial Image function was used and summarize the conclusions

Assessing resilience in tourism: The case of Greece

During the last decade a new concept has emerged in the regional science debate, the notion of regional resilience, defined as the ability of a region to prevent, prepare, respond and recover after a disturbance, in order that this disturbance does not stand as an obstacle to the region¢s development. Regional resilience is characterized by the capacity of a regional economy to i) withstand external pressures, ii) to respond positively to external changes and iii) to adjust and to learn. According to the international literature, a region should exhibit certain characteristics in order to be considered as resilient, including resourcefulness, performance, redundancy, diversity, innovative learning, connectedness, robustness and rapidity. The aim of this paper is to explore the notion of resilience in the tourism industry. Tourism, an important economic activity and fast growing industry worldwide, is one of the main income ‎sources for many countries, including Greece. In Greece, tourism represents over 17% of the country's GNP and 18,3% of total employment. During the years of recent economic crisis, the Greek tourism sector has been affected less than other economic activities, indicating its importance for the Greek economy. Nevertheless, significant variations in the resilience of tourism on economic crisis impact seem to have occurred among regions and therefore research regarding regional tourism resilience has grown in importance. This paper aims to investigate the extent to which Greek regions are resilient as far as tourism industry is concerned. More specifically, we valuate the adaptability of regions, tourism destinations and actors to the socio-economic changes and the degree of resilience of each region during the economic crisis i.e. whether they can cope with it, overcome it and recover from it. Furthermore, we intend to investigate how the evaluation of present resilience can contribute to the improvement of resilience planning and management on a regional basis. The central thesis of this research is that regional variations in the tourism industry resilience call for regionally adjusted tourism planning and management policies. In order to achieve the aim of the research, we will examine the impact of economic crisis on regional hospitality industry employment, measured by the change in the number of jobs in hospitality business (hotels) within each region, and attempt to model employment resilience after the industry experiences an economic shock. Tourism industry is a critical source of regional economic activity, and therefore it is important to understand what happens to industry employment due to economic crisis and the mechanisms by which regional tourism industry resilience is achieved. In this way, we will investigate the impact of the socio-economic changes in regions and through the noted declinations we will estimate the extent to which these regions are tourism resilient in economic shocks

Τhe impact of economic crisis on the regional disparities and the allocation of economic branches in Greek regions

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the changes occurred in regional disparities and sectoral specialization of the Greek regions due to the economic crisis. In this framework, we explore the regional disparities, along with the allocation and specialization of economic sectors in two separate time periods, the pre-crisis period (2000-2007) and the crisis period (2008-2014). The variable used is regional employment in the branches of economic activity. The methods used are Coefficient of Variation, Location Quotients and Shift-Share Analysis. According to the results, we classify the spatial units into categories and we propose means of regional policy. The results show that the disparities increased during the first period and declined in the next period of crisis, without however reaching the levels of 2000. In the first period the dynamic economic sectors are concentrated mainly in the metropolitan region of Attiki and in the insular region of Notio Aigaio, while local advantages are shown in several regions except Attiki. During the period of crisis Attiki and Notio Aigaio have lost their sectoral dynamism, while few regions resist. Regarding the local share effects, the more urbanized regions show negative local shares. The rest of regions exhibit local advantages

RECENT GEOMORPHIC CHANGES AND ANTHROPOGENIC ACTIVITIES IN THE DELTAIC PLAIN OF PINIOS RIVER IN CENTRAL GREECE

The Pinios river delta is a Late Holocene arcuate type delta, located in the southern Thermaikos gulf (Central Greece). In order to determine the processes which contributed in the recent configuration of the delta, a detailed geomorphic map at the scale of 1:5000 has been prepared showing both the deltaic plain and the coastal zone features using GIS techniques. Comparative examinations of aerial photographs taken in different dates and reliable maps of the last two centuries along with field observations depict recent changes of the delta morphology. The most important factors for the development of the delta are fluvial sedimentation, wave activity and longshore currents in a tectonically active area. Land uses throughout the delta plain have been mapped in an attempt to identify socio-economic activities. The dominant feature in the deltaic plain is the numerous abandoned meandering channels. The delta shoreline is generally retreating due to marine processes especially where former river mouths occur. Finally, various future sea-level rise scenarios have been analyzed and an assessment of the impacts of the potential global future sea-level rise to the delta is estimated