Regional economic development: Analysis and planning strategy

In the third part, entitled 'Regional economic growth and knowledge', three empirical papers (chapters 11-13) evaluate the impact of innovativeness and human capital on regional income or productivity growth.Adriana Di Liberto suggests that human-capital stocks affect per-capita income growth positively only in the richer Spanish NUTS2 regions but not in the poorer Spanish NUTS2 regions.Roberto Basile addresses a similar topic and arrives at broadly similar results for (Western) Europe as a whole but uses a more ambitious theoretical background and a more sophisticated empirical methodology.And Frank van Oort and Otto Raspe identify, using a variety of indicators, three fundamental, mutually independent statistical indicators that jointly characterize the extent to which a regional economy can be considered a 'knowledge economy'.They show that, among these knowledge economy indicators, the amount of R&D inputs is related less closely to regional growth in the Netherlands than the abundance of knowledge workers and the amount of innovation output.Being a collection of rather heterogeneous papers, the scientific value this book adds to the literature does not significantly exceed the sum of the values added by the individual papers.The book features an introductory overview of the topics addressed by the individual papers but not a summary or integrative interpretation of their results.The empirical parts have no or at best weak links to the theoretical part, and cross-references between papers are very rare.In addition to Buesa et al. (chapter 7) and van Oort and Raspe (chapter 13), there are, still, a number of papers that may be of interest to a broader audience, and may guide future research.The historical perspective adopted by Lehrer (chapter 2), for example, adds new, exciting insights into success conditions for high-tech industries, and Basile (chapter 12) shows how regional heterogeneity can be dealt with effectively and in a theoretically consistent way.