Regional and Urban Economics

Research focus

The Peer review has evaluated this group as Good

The research focus of the group in Regional and Urban Economics regards different issues concerning: i) Regional economic growth and disparities; ii) Urban development and urban sustainable development; iii) territorial impact assessment of large projects/ programmes. i) Regional growth and disparities. In this field the group has tackled the issue of the determinants of regional growth and regional development both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, the group has developed the milieu innovateur theory”, a neo-Scumpeterian approach to local development. The group leader (Robero Camagni) is one of the founding father of the GREMI group, an international group of experts dealing with the concept of the “milieu innovateur”. Econometric analyses made by the group have proved the empirical validity of the theoretical approach, and been published in international journals and collected books. Moreover, the group has participated in the up-to-date theoretical debate on absolute vs. comparative advantage in regional competitiveness, confirming the soundness of the concept (contra: Paul Krugman) and indicating new directions for effective policies; important contributions in this field were published by Roberto Camagni (OECD, 2001; Urban Studies, 2002). Still in regional economics, many studies have been developed on the role of ICTs on regional growth, which have led to a number of publications, since the first monograph by Roberta Capello (Ashgate, 1994). This field has also been tackled both theoretically (with the development of the concept of network externalities) and empirically. Recently (2003), the group has participated in the ESPON programme of the EU as expert in the field of ICTs and regional development. In 2004 within the ESPON programme, the group was asked to build an econometric model with the aim to supply quantitative territorial scenarios in the next 10 to 15 years. This has led to a three years work, producing a macroeconomic and territorial model for all 259 NUTS 2 regions of the 27 EU member states, able to predict future regional growth rates under different assumptions on the main social, macroeoconomic and institutional driving forces of growth. In this field, a member of the group is the author of a textbook in Regional Economics published by Il Mulino, translated into English and published by Routledge (2007). ii) Urban development and urban sustainable development. In this field the group is active in different sub-fields, also with theoretical and empirical works. First of all, the group leader has written a textbook in Urban Economics (the only one written by an Italian), translated into French (Economica, 1996) and Spanish (Bosch, 2005). Roberta Capello has edited an advanced textbook in “Advances in Urban Economics”, co-authored with Prof. Peter Nijkamp of the Free University of Amsterdam. In this field, the theoretical research issues tackled concern the determinants of urban growth: going against general belief 20 that city size explains much of the urban performance, a theoretical model has been conceptualised, taking into account the urban functional specialisation and the urban system as main determinants, besides city size, of the urban economic performance: the model has econometrically been tested. An important theoretical reflection was made by the group on the concept of urban sustainability, accompanied by many empirical studies. A definition of urban sustainable development was launched, departing from the usual one referring to natural resources: in fact, the city is an artificial body, whose mission is to enhance social interaction, economic efficiency and quality of life; sustainability should be defined according to these dimensions. In this field the group was called by the Italian Presidency of the EU to produce an official document for the Meeting of EU Ministers for Territorial Affairs (Venice, 1996) on “Cities in Europe: Globalisation, Sustainability and Cohesion” (Italian Presidency of Council of Ministers, 1996). A further scientific elaboration concerned the concept of “City-networks”, developed since some years and assumed as a policy or strategic tool by the European Spatial Development Perspective (1999). Scientific elaborations, both theoretical and empirical, in Capello, Nijkamp (2004) iii) Territorial impact assessment of large projects/ programmes. In this field the group has recently tackled two different issues. The first concerns the ex-ante evaluation of EU policies for regional development. In this field, the group has been asked to provide an ex-ante evaluation of EU ICTs policies for regional development, within the EPSON programme. The second issue deals with the development of a methodology to assess the territorial impact of large projects/programmes/ policies. This has lead to the creation of the TEQUILA model (2006), able to measure the impact on territorial cohesion of large EU projects, applied to transport infrastructure projects-TENs. The building of the model gave the group the chance to work on an acceptable and operational definition of “territorial cohesion”, a still vague concept proposed by the European Commission. A pioneering exercise in project assessment was conducted for the Municipality of Trento: the social benefits of a large urban project, defined through their forecasted impact of land rents and a hedonic price econometric methodology (Camagni, Capello, 2006). Moreover, the group hosts the managing editorial board of the international journal entitled “the Italian journal of Regional Science”.

Dipartimento di afferenza

Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale (DIG)

Docenti afferenti

Full Professors
Roberto Camagni
Roberta Capello
Assistant Professors
Ugo Fratesi