Regional Disparities in Europe

Abstract

In the last decades, and particularly in the Nineties, The European Economy has been widely characterised by regional disparities. This paper aims to evaluate if different regional economic structures, such as productive mix and labour market composition, contribute to this disparities and to what extent they prevent the convergence and/or favour divergent clusters of regions. To this purpose we shall apply a multivariate analysis method, named STATIS, to a set of regional characteristic indicators that will allow us to estimate some latent factors which are able to measure the regional differences and their dynamic.european regional differences; multivariate analysis; STATIS