Successful European regions in a global economy: a synthesis and outlook

This short paper concludes the special issue by bringing together a number of common patterns emerging from the five regions investigated. It appears that these five regions have been successful in globalization thanks to a pro-active approach which upgraded their functional specialization, making the most from their assets and being open to global flows. These results are expected to be valid for most global player European regions, but not necessarily for other types of regions. Moreover, it would be interesting to reproduce the same analysis after the end of the crisis to disentangle if and to what extent the same assets which allow regions to prosper in a period of growth and globalization are also helpful to deal with periods of crisis.