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The geographical indication (GI) scheme of the European Union guarantees visibility and protection to high‐quality agri‐food products associated with a demarcated region of origin. This paper estimates the impact of the scheme in attracting agri‐food foreign direct investment (FDI) in European NUTS3 regions, using a novel dataset and a generalized propensity score matching approach. Areas endorsed with GIs attract more FDI in agri‐food‐related activities than their non‐GI counterparts. Positive effects, estimated for FDI inflows, related job creation and inter‐sectoral spillovers on local employment, involves territories with lower institutional quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of motorway infrastructure in determining the export propensity of Italian regions. First, exporter fixed effects are estimated using a gravity model. Then, in a second step of the analysis, they are used as a proxy for export propensity and are regressed on highways endowment. Since there may be endogeneity issues, to investigate the causal relation between highways and export propensity, a historical route instrumental variable approach is followed, using the ancient Roman road network as a source of exogenous variation. Results show that, even when controlling for geographic, economic, and historical factors, a 10% increase in the provision of motorways leads to about a 1.3–2% increase in exports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural and creative production (CCP) can create, renovate, and shape places' socio‐economic environments. Recent contributions suggest that culture can activate a set of cognitive and productive mechanisms that form the basis of human capital (HC) dynamics. Bridging these two streams of research, the present paper investigates possible causal relationships between CCP and HC at the regional level. Empirically, we used measures of employment in the cultural and creative sectors as proxies for CCP and applied generalized method of moments (GMM) panel estimations to yearly data from 283 European NUTS 2 regions from 2014 to 2020. The findings suggest that CCP positively affects regions' average levels of HC even controlling for several economic and demographic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While considerable attention has been directed to the national‐level impacts of global value chains, far less attention has been focused on the way in which global production fragmentation has affected regional economies. Using some measures derived from a multiregional, multisectoral input–output model, this paper analyzes the position and share of EU regions in Global Value Chains (GVC). The spatial determinants of these two dimensions are explored using spatial econometric methods to capture the influence of neighboring regions on these outcomes. Empirically, the focus is on a set of NUTS2 European regions for the most recent year (2010) of the EUREGIO database. Our results confirm the hypothesis of spatial dependence between regions conditioning the engagement and position GVCs, suggesting that global production processes are influenced by regional and local factors. In particular, spatial spillover effects play a significant role conditioned by both geographical proximity and similarity of production structures. The results show that sharing certain characteristics, some of them associated to their degree of proximity and the neighbouring situation of regions condition their specialization, participation and positioning in GVC, generating some important insights informative for the formulation of regional development policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to compare the drivers of clustering of rural and urban creative industries in England. We use pre‐pandemic web‐scraped data from 154,618 creative industry organizations in England, and use a novel technique to identify 71 distinct rural creative "microclusters" of geographically proximate creative firms. We then consider the role of place‐based assets and agglomeration in the presence of microclusters at a micro‐level geography and find that the determinants of microclustering are generally consistent between rural and urban areas. On that basis we argue that policies to support creative clusters may drive rural regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationship between related and unrelated variety and regional development traps in 26 NUTS 2 regions across Turkey from 2014 to 2021. We propose two unique measures, DT1 and DT2, for these traps based on deviations from EU and emerging market nations. Our findings suggest a notable negative correlation between related variety and DT1, implying that increasing related variety could potentially mitigate the risk of falling into development traps. Furthermore, DT1 appeared to be more reliable than DT2 in accurately representing the risk of regional development traps, particularly in countries experiencing high growth deviations, like Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this research was to study the influence of related variety on the economic performance of Spanish provinces during the international crisis (2009–2013) and the post‐crisis period (2014–2018), with the goal of contributing to assess the validity of the skill‐relatedness approach. The research is based on labor flows in a sample of more than one million affiliated workers. Our results confirmed the influence of related variety on the growth of GDP and employment in knowledge‐based industries, in protecting against unemployment, as well as on the creation of new firms, although with marked differences according to the economic cycle. Robustness issues and possible lines of progress using this novel methodology are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the synthetic control method to determine the economic impact of shale exploitation on Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Estimation results are mixed. The shale development decreased the poverty rate and increased the employment growth rate in Pennsylvania and West Virginia in the short run. Top oil and gas producing counties in West Virginia also experienced short‐term personal income growth due to fracking. However, most of the positive impacts disappeared a few years after the initial boom periods. The shale development did not bring significant economic benefits to Ohio. Further, shale drilling activities exert a potential long‐term negative effect on population growth in all three states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]