Laura Resmini

Globalization and European Strategies: Alternative Scenarios

As explained in the introductory chapter, the interest of this study is not only in the success factors of benefiting regions in the past, but mainly concerns what will happen to benefiting and global regions once different and alternative assumptions are made on how globalization will continue to affect international markets.

Regional Attractiveness and Its Determinants

As discussed in the previous chapter, high-quality and efficient territorial capital assets, together with high regional attractiveness, are the elements on which regional competitiveness is based. Territorial attractiveness therefore matters for regional growth, and this applies to all regions, regardless of their exposure to globalization processes. The continuous inflows of competitive and innovative economic factors, and mainly entrepreneurship and financial capital, not only from other regions of the same country but also from outside the country’s borders, make the difference in explaining regional growth differentials.

Scenario Methodology: A New MASST Model

This part of the book is devoted to the creation of scenarios under different assumptions on how globalization patterns will develop in the future.

The European Territory in 2020: Winners and Losers in a Globalized World

This chapter is devoted to presentation of the results for the three scenarios set out in the previous chapter: the baseline, the proactive, and the defensive scenarios. First of all, it reports aggregate results for Europe as a whole, and for Eastern and Western countries. As will be shown, the three scenarios exhibit rather different growth patterns, and they highlight interesting aspects: the combination of proactive, modernizing, and reconverting strategies in an economic setting of a short-term crisis produces the most expansionary scenario. In general, the strategies put in place in the external world heavily influence European growth trajectories in both scenarios (Sect. 10.2).

Towards a Conclusion: Policy Implications

This chapter examines the potential new role and style of regional policies in the European Union (EU) in the context of the different globalization strategies highlighted in the previous chapters. Regional policy suggestions are derived deductively from interpretations of the results of the empirical analysis on both the past and the simulation exercise. The latter has been based on different scenarios concerning the evolution of macroeconomic, structural, and technological forces unified into a few stylized “strategies” adopted by the main global player countries and by the European Commission, and framed by alternative assumptions on the duration of the economic crisis.

Global Regions in Europe

The second chapter of this book evidenced that global economic processes are not homogeneous across space and that they differently affect the various blocks of countries and the European Union. Chapter 3 put forward some theoretical reasons as to why some territories are more influenced than others by the reorganization of production taking place at spatial level and generated by globalization processes. The argument developed in Chap. 3 requires in-depth empirical analysis able to highlight to what extent the various trends are actually due to globalization forces, and how these trends affect the regions of Europe.

European Regional Performance in a Globalized World

The results of the descriptive analysis of globalization trends carried out in the previous chapter evidence a European territory fragmented with respect to globalization in that some regions are more favoured than others as the natural locations for some globalization processes to occur. Whether or not the growth opportunities offered by globalization processes are grasped depends closely on a region’s capacity to pro-act and re-act to external stimuli.

Globalization and the Reshaping of Regional Economies: Favored Territories

The previous chapter showed that the globalization of production is not just the off-shoring and outsourcing of production phases in developing countries; it no longer simply affects the division of labor between emerging and advanced countries, developed and developing economies; and it is no longer confined to the manufacturing industries: the majority of cross-border relationships directly regard advanced countries and take place in service sectors. These various factors explain that current changes in the form of globalization trends affect the division of labor of subnational economies within advanced countries, and regional economies increasingly compete to seize the opportunities offered by globalization.

The EU in the Global Economy

Investigation of whether and to what extent the EU has been participating in the ongoing globalization process is not an easy task because globalization is a complex phenomenon and Europe has played a complex role in it.

Spatial Patterns of Globalization Trends

In the first part of this book, close attention has been paid to the importance of a regional analysis of globalization trends since these are expected to be spatially differentiated, and to have diverse impacts not only at the national, but especially at the regional level. This chapter takes up the challenge of describing the spatial patterns exhibited by globalization trends over recent years, the aim being to highlight which European regions are most affected.