Do EU Regions Benefit from Smart Specialization?

Smart specialization was conceived by EU policy-makers as a “bottom-up” framework to identify new growth paths connected to the existing knowledge cores of regions. Although the operationalization of smart specialization has proven difficult, a recent “mapping” of technologies in terms of knowledge relatedness and complexity suggests a useful cost-benefit framework. We extend these ideas, locating EU cities in a smart specialization space and tracking their development of alternative technologies over the period 1981 to 2015. Fixed effects panel models show that GDP growth and employment growth are higher for cities in Europe that diversified into more related and more complex technologies, consistent with the logic of smart specialization. 

Great speaker David Rigby is a professor of geography & statistics at UCLA. His undergraduate work in geography took place at the University of Salford in the UK, and his PhD work was completed at McMaster University in Canada. His research focuses upon evolutionary economic geography, on globalization and the impacts of trade, on agglomeration, and on the geography of innovation and the flow of knowledge. He is co-author of 3 books and about 100 research articles. David Rigby has held visiting professorships at University College Dublin and the University of Cagliari. He is past editor of Economic Geography and editorial board member for Economic Geography, Journal of Economic Geography, Journal of Regional Science, Environment and Planning A, Growth and Change and Regional Studies, Regional Science. 

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