Andrea Caragliu

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Verified

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at Politecnico di Milano

Over the past decade, Europe faced multiple challenges that have already caused structural changes in the way regional growth patterns have been taking place. Among many, these challenges include a substantial restructuring of Global Value Chains, with a reversal of the process of offshoring production towards the EU, and the technological transfor...

Research on program evaluation, and in particular on firm cooperation policies, has been scant on the impact of space-specific characteristics on program impacts. Few studies have analyzed how spatial features, that are sticky and non-mobile, may affect the intensity of a program’s effect on the targeted economic outcome. This paper uses a regional...

During the past decade, world economic development was coupled with disruptive challenges. Among them, digitalisation and new forms of globalisation represent a potential threat for economic growth opportunities and for the future of labour markets. Digital transition calls for the assessment of the impact of robotisation and digitalisation on skil...

Following up on a two decades-long debate on Smart Cities, this article provides quantitative evidence regarding the impact on urban economic outcomes of the adoption of Smart City strategies in planning and managing modern cities. In order to achieve this aim, a meta-analysis of quantitative and modeling studies is presented as a systematic synthe...

The debate on urban smartness as an instrument for managing more efficient cities has been revolving around the notion that Smart Cities might be causing an increase in inequalities. This effect would be caused by the role played in smart urban transformations by Multi-National Corporations, which would be influencing local policymakers’ agendas. I...

In Spring 2020, the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic hit Europe most severely. While empirical evidence on the economic costs of the strict lockdown measures enacted during the periods before the widespread diffusion of vaccines is now available, little is known about the impact of both strict lockdowns as well as of partial closures on border r...

The reasons for changes in ranking within urban systems are a matter of a wide and long debate. Some focus on a continuous and smooth ordering of cities by their size within the urban system, in the tradition of Zipf’s law. Others focus on discrete, discontinuous ordering, as cities take on functions at different levels, such as specialized market...

Borders prevent the optimal exploitation of socio‐economic and environmental resources. A relevant obstacle due to missed integration is associated with legal and administrative barriers, which cause the emergence of untapped potentials . This paper exploits the case study of the Interreg Central Europe programme. Removing borders among countries i...

Innovation vouchers are policy instruments supporting the collaboration of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with specialized knowledge suppliers. These innovation vouchers are typically appreciated by beneficiaries because of their simple application and reporting procedures. However, because of their small size, innovation vouchers seem to have...

Sulla base della teoria delle localita centrali, questo lavoro paragona la performance delle 14 citta metropolitane, istituite con la legge Delrio, al resto del Paese, per comprendere se tali citta si distacchino dal resto del Paese per posizionamento nella gerarchia urbana. I risultati suggeriscono che i criteri di applicazione della legge con cui...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the impact of adopting energy efficiency measures, labeled “White Certificates”, on the economic performance of companies active in the paper and glass sector in Italy. White Certificates, launched in 2005, represent the longest-lasting and effective policy tool to stimulate energy efficiency, in particu...

This paper addresses the important question “Which European areas will be able to better react to the crisis induced by COVID‐19 and how regional disparities will look like?”. In order to provide an answer, a “new normality” scenario is built, comprising the structural changes likely to take place in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. To develop...

While prior econometric forecasting models focus on either macroeconomic or territorial aspects as drivers of regional growth, the fourth version of the MAcroeconomic, Sectoral, Social, Territorial (MASST4) model merges these two conceptual approaches to regional growth. Mechanisms of territorial complexity governing regional development theories,...

The 2016 referendum held in the UK about the possibility to quit EU membership as well as a wave of populistic movements sweeping all over European Countries seem to suggest that less integration could be an outcome for the European Union. This paper has the aim to measure the cost of a missed integration, by highlighting what GDP growth would be i...

Among the vast number of regional growth forecasting models, the past 15 years witnessed the emergence of the MAcroeconomic, Sectoral, Social, Territorial (MASST) model. The MASST model aims at merging macroeconomic elements with territorial features for forecasting regional growth trajectories. In fact, the model was created with the aim to overco...

Over the last three decades, the research group on regional and urban economics at the Politecnico di Milano has carried out studies on theoretical and empirical issues concerning the structure, competitiveness and growth of cities. A broad critical synthesis of this line of research is presented in Camagni et al. (Urban Empire, Edward Elgar, Chelt...

Smart City policies have attracted significant funding over the last few years. However, only less evidence is available of their impact on urban economic performance. In this paper, we look at the urban growth and innovation impact of Smart City policies, exploiting a dataset collected for these analyses comprising data on Smart City characteristi...

Country borders are traditionally interpreted as barriers to trade, since they limit the access to large markets of goods and intermediate assets, with negative effects on production, employment levels, and growth. The European Union is not an exception in this respect and, despite the establishment of the European Single Market, legal and administ...

Smart City policies have attracted relevant attention and funding over the last few years. While the time seems now ripe to conclude that such policies have a positive impact on urban economic growth, the picture is much less clear when looking at the microfoundations of this effect. In this paper we look at the urban innovation impact of Smart Cit...

The literature on borders as barriers to economic growth presents some weaknesses in conceptualizing and measuring border effects due to obstacles of different nature (e.g., physical, institutional, and social/cultural). This article aims at overcoming this limitation by demonstrating that political borders actually comprise several lines of fractu...

Both international and regional economics discuss borders as barriers to economic growth. They hamper trade flows between areas sharing an international border (a demand effect), as well as causing firms’ inefficiency because of the increase in production costs (supply side). In the theoretical and empirical discussions, no question has been raised...

This editorial frames the contents of this special issue within the broad context of the smart city literature. In particular, the editorial first argues for the novelty of the smart city concept with respect to previous planning notions. The smart city literature has provided much insight into present-day urban management issues. In this sense, th...

Remarkable academic interest and substantial funding from national and supranational bodies have been concentrating on the topic of smart cities; consequently, smart city policies have attracted large amounts of funding. However, no empirical evidence is to date available on the economic rationale of these policies. In particular, while few studies...

The paper measures regional GDP growth losses that a smaller market size caused by the reintroduction of legal and administrative barriers would cause. We model augmented barriers in a Keynesian framework, pointing at four effects: a border effect, stronger for regions close to borders; an exposure effect, stronger for regions open to trade; a cent...

The aim of this paper is to assess the collective benefits for the metropolitan city of Milan arising from the project to restore the Navigli, the ancient urban canals flowing underground for a large part. In this paper two of the most important impacts of this urban transformation, mostly of intangible nature, are considered. On the one hand, the...

For at least two decades, cities have been back on the policy agenda in both Europe and the US as the pivotal places where the new societal goals of enhancing competitiveness, wellbeing, sustainability and cohesion may find their driving forces—and where they will also face the main complexities and contradictions (Glaeser et al. 1992; Camagni and...

As I sit to gather memories of my relationship with Roberto (who to date never explicitly told me to simply address him as such-so I shall take the liberty to do so from now on) I listen to Dave Brubeck’s “Time out” and enjoy digging into our 12 years relationship.

This paper presents a new methodology to measure border effects from a different perspective with respect to the standard gravitational approach. The methodology proposed measures supply-side border effects by identifying two types of limits produced by the border to the productive system: inefficiency in exploiting local resources (efficiency need...

Smart policies at the urban (smart city initiatives) and the regional (smart specialisation Strategies, S3) level, both fostered by the need to better spend the reduced budget available for EU policy-making, have recently gained much attention. While some attempts have been made to explore the growth potential of the two policies separately, no emp...

This paper offers a new perspective on urban innovation and enters the debate on the contribution of non-material growth-enhancing factors to the socio-economic performance of cities. Because of the often widespread availability of “hard” production factors, most cities increasingly compete for attracting non-material production factors whose role,...

A better understanding of loan repayment behavior of borrowers can contribute to the development of microfinance. This paper investigates the repayment performance of borrowers of a nonprofit Indian microfinance institution, the Indian Institute for Mother and Child – IIMC, using a novel data set. We collected raw data on more than 1600 borrowers,...

Several types of proximity affect knowledge flows with different strength. Insufficient attention has been paid to the interrelations between such forms of proximity at the same time, each one assumed to facilitate the flow of goods, ideas, and spillovers on its own but not in relation to one another. Moreover, if decreasing returns have been conce...

This article adds to the empirical evidence on the impact of agglomeration externalities on regional growth along three main dimensions. On the basis of data on 259 Europe NUTS2 (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) regions and 15 NACE (Nomenclature statistique des Activités économiques dans la Communauté Européenne) 1.1 2-digit indust...

Agglomeration economies play a fundamental role in the explanation of urban growth. However, recent theoretical approaches present some contradictions. The literature, in fact, explains growth by means of a static concept of agglomeration economies, suggesting that large cities, because of their larger size and higher efficiency, automatically fost...

This article summarizes the vast literature on the concept of Smart City. The concept is first framed in the existing urban economics literature and the ongoing urbanization trends. The article, then, reviews the history of the Smart City concept from its inception, as mostly focusing on information and communication technology endowments as means...

Usually, knowledge spillovers (KS) are related to geographic proximity. In the present study, we measure KS on the basis of different proximity matrices, focusing on the relational, social, cognitive and technological preconditions for knowledge diffusion. In the light of previous studies on KS, we examine: (i) which types of proximity enhance or h...

Although the crisis is a world phenomenon, its impact is not at all spatially invariant. The aim of the article is to analyse the spatial effects of the crisis, doing so through a scenario-building exercise in which policies are kept constant, and economic growth is mainly driven by macroeconomic and supply side trends on the assumption that the cr...

Critically assessing and integrating the existing literature on static agglomeration economies, this paper overcomes the agglomeration-growth shortcut actually present in the literature by underlying the role of dynamic agglomeration economies and by empirically identifying their determinants. These latter consist in the quality of the activities h...

Research on Smart Cities has come of age. Intense discussion on this topic has been ongoing for years, and the academic prominence of this concept has also engendered several policy initiatives inspired by this label at different administrative levels. However, to date, no large-scale evaluation of the relationship between urban smartness and smart...

In front of fiercer competition from outside (especially from emerging countries), of the contraction of the internal demand, following the crisis and the problems with public finances, and of the process of European integration that fostered increases in wages and inflation in its Eastern countries, Europe can no longer prosper without a clear lon...

Structural adjustment in the European Union emerged as the result of the 7-year crisis, providing risks and opportunities to national and regional economies. The effects that these structural changes will generate are difficult to be foreseen. This article builds after-crisis scenarios for Europe on the basis of alternative evolutions of these stru...

This article measures the spatial heterogeneity of the costs of the economic crisis and assesses the role of cities as sources of regional resilience in Europe. Cities hosting financial activities have been severely hit during the crisis; however, they also host hard and soft territorial capital elements—high physical accessibility, access to infor...

Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/11311/986050

In the last 15 years, empirical evidence has emerged about the fact that European first-rank cities have not always led national economic performance, and when they did, the difference between first- and second-rank cities in explaining national growth has not been significant. A recent work [Dijkstra, L., Garcilazo, E. & McCann, P. (2013) The econ...

This article deals with the implementation of a new version of a macroeconometric regional growth model called MAcroeconomic, Sectoral, Social, Territorial Model (MASST). The new version presents interesting novelties with respect to the past, since it is able to embrace the two main supranational regulations with which the European Union binds dec...

In this paper, the stylised assumption that one single 'optimal' city size exists for all cities - achieved when marginal location costs equal marginal location benefits - is abandoned, as well as the opposite view that each city operates on its own cost and production curves, defining a specific optimal size. Instead, this work maintains the compa...

Firms may be seen as critical change agents in any spatial system. Consequently, the recent regional growth literature has rightly positioned firms at the centre of regional dynamics (see e.g. Capello and Nijkamp 2010). Entrepreneurship and innovation have assumed a dominant position in regional development studies. The presence of entrepreneurs is...

This paper sets out the conceptual approach that orients all the empirical works selected for this special issue, namely, the notion of territorial patterns of innovation. Recently proposed as a more appropriate conceptual framework in which to understand spatial innovation patterns, territorial patterns of innovation are defined as the combination...

This paper analyses the evolution of the information and communication technology (ICT) industry in Lombardy, with a specific focus on the Milan metropolitan area, where most major ICT firms are located. Until the early 1990s, Lombardy's firms enjoyed a technological advantage, which led to relevant profits, innovative products on the markets, and...

The potential welfare benefits from free movement of people are large. Especially in Europe, actual flows are lower than one would expect on the basis of economic differences between regions and countries. This paper empirically investigates the importance of cultural barriers in explaining the limited migration flows in Europe. We show that cultur...

Usually, the diffusion of a non-rival market knowledge externality - called a Knowledge Spillover (KS) - is related to geographical proximity. In this paper we explore the channels through which knowledge spreads. Compared with earlier work on KS measures, this study makes a step forward by calculating KS (as a balance of positive and negative abso...

This paper enters the debate on the islands of innovation through the lens of the standard Lucas (1988) growth model. It begins with a review of the theoretical details of the model and of the ensuing main empirical results, which can be identified when estimating such model on a sample of 261 EU27 NUTS2 regions. Next, empirical results are interpr...

In this paper, the stylized assumption that one single 'optimal' city size exists for all cities is abandoned, as well as the opposite view that each city operates on its own cost and production curves. A new model of equilibrium urban size is presented, on the basis of urban costs and benefits, and then estimated on a sample of 59 European (FUA) c...

In this paper, the stylized assumption that one single “optimal” city size exists for all cities—achieved when marginal location costs equal marginal location benefits—is abandoned, as well as the opposite view that each city operates on its own cost and production curves, defining a specific optimal size. Instead, this work maintains the comparabi...

In this paper we adopt a comprehensive definition of Smart City and examine whether and how the main characteristics of urban smartness are growth-enhancing. With a sample of cities from the European Union we assess the city-specific impacts on urban performance of a complex “urban smartness” indicator by applying a Spatial Autoregressive Local Est...

The presence of large cities in a region represents a potential for regional innovation capacity: cities are in fact expected to generate dynamic agglomeration economies and knowledge spillovers. The paper adds to previous analyses on this topic by investigating whether the linkage between the presence of cities in the region and the innovative per...

The economic growth literature suggests that knowledge spillovers are subject to distance decay effects. In this paper the main aim is to provide a theoretical framework and empirical evidence on the role played by other kinds of proximities, namely relational, social and technological proximity, in explaining productivity growth. Using a sample of...

We design a conceptual framework for linking two approaches: absorptive capacity and spatial Knowledge Spillovers (KSs). Regions produce new knowledge, but only part of it is efficiently adopted in the economy; the share of efficiently adopted technology depends on cognitive capital. Our dataset is based on a panel of European regions over the peri...

Several notions of proximity affect the intensity of scientific relations with different strength. Insufficient attention has been paid to the interrelations between such forms of proximity, each one assumed to hamper the flow of goods, ideas, and spillovers on its own, but not in relation to each other. This paper aims to fill this gap. This goal...

Our modern world is moving towards a ‘ New Urban World'. More people than ever before are living in urban areas and modern cities are becoming powerhouses of creative ideas, innovative technologies, sustainable developments and socioeconomic wealth in an open and globalizing economy. And most likely this trend will continue. Cities will also play a...

This paper offers a statistical analysis of the regional contextual drivers and aspects of innovative firms in the high-tech sector in the Netherlands. Data are collected by means of 244 interviews among actors working for 61 Dutch high-tech firms. This individual micro data set is next merged with regional attributes and characteristics, collected...

The chapter demonstrates that the inclusion of the abovementioned relations in the analytical hierarchy framework is significant, as it allows, for the first time, the opportunity for this network model to capture the triple helix of a smart urban or regional development and to verify whether the transformation of cities it ushers in is not merely...

Focusing on a subset of European cities belonging to the SmartCities (inter) Regional Academic Network (SCRAN), i.e. Bremerhaven, Edinburgh, Groningen, Karlstad, Kortijk, Kristiansand, Lillesand, Osterholz, Norfolk, this chapter will offer a decision network model built around an analytical hierarchy able to verify whether the development of cities...

The chapter demonstrates that the inclusion of the abovementioned relations in the analytical hierarchy framework is significant, as it allows, for the first time, the opportunity for this network model to capture the triple helix of a smart urban or regional development and to verify whether the transformation of cities it ushers in is not merely...

Knowledge drives the growth of nations and regions in a competitive space-economy. Hence, we would expect a strong correlation between investments in knowledge and learning processes, on the one hand, and productivity increases, on the other. However, the empirical evidence shows consistent discrepancies between knowledge inputs and economic perfor...

Knowledge triggers regional growth. Evidence suggests that skilled labor force concentrates in islands of innovation, determining an advantage for innovative regions and a challenge for lagging ones. We address the role of knowledge in shaping effective markets for skilled labor. Estimates are based on the Lucas (1988) model, with EVS and EUROSTAT...

Standard neoclassical growth models (Solow 1956; Mankiw et al. 1992) implicitly assume that the technological progress is characterized by a worldwide global interdependence between economies without frictions. In contrast, recent mainstream contributions to the economic growth literature (Lòpez-Bazo et al. 2004; Ertur and Koch 2007) support the id...

Statistical evidence suggests that the relevance of knowledge spillovers has increased over time. In this paper we focus on regional knowledge spillovers and adopt a new econometric transformation that allows inference on potential inter-regional knowledge spillovers, accounting for spatial interdependencies.Determinants of inter-regional knowledge...

Focusing on a subset of European cities belonging to the SmartCities (inter) Regional Academic Network (SCRAN), i.e. Bremerhaven, Edinburgh, Groningen, Karlstad, Kortijk, Kristiansand, Lillesand, Osterholz, Norfolk, this chapter will offer a decision network model built around an analytical hierarchy able to verify whether the development of cities...

Innovation plays an important and growing role in the modern knowledge economy. It drives the growth of nations and regions in a competitive space-economy. Hence, we would expect a strong correlation between investments in R&D, knowledge and learning processes on the one hand, and productivity increases on the other hand. However, empirical evidenc...

The choice of an appropriate social rate of discount is critical in the decision-making process on public investments. In this paper we review the literature on social discounting, and address in particular a recently growing field of related research, that is, individual time preferences. We argue that an explicit consideration and analysis of the...

The choice of an appropriate social rate of discount is critical in the decision-making process on public investments. In this paper we review the literature on social discounting, and address in particular a recently growing field of related research, that is, individual time preferences. We argue that an explicit consideration and analysis of the...

The choice of an appropriate social rate of discount is critical in the decision-making process on public investments. In this paper we review the literature on social discounting, and address in particular a recently growing field of related research, that is, individual time preferences. We argue that an explicit consideration and analysis of the...