ECONOMIC STRUCTURE AND REGIONAL ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE IN ADVANCED EU ECONOMIES

Recent economic turmoil has revived interest in the quest for sustainable growth. Current economic thinking attaches growing importance to industrial development. The roots of such thinking can be traced back to traditional arguments about the beneficial role of manufacturing for economic growth through horizontal and vertical spillovers to other sectors. These spillovers are of particular importance at the regional level, as such externalities tend to be localized in nature. The objective of this paper is to explore the relationship between economic structure and regional growth in ten Western European EU member states in the post-crisis period. The analysis wishes to answer the question of whether regions with a higher concentration of manufacturing outperform their counterparts with more diverse economic structures. A spatial panel econometric technique is applied in order to distinguish between the intra-regional and inter-regional effects of economic structure, yielding recommendations for policy makers in the field of industrial policy.