Abstract. Deepening in the European Union (EU) integration process has enhanced the question of economic disparities at a regional level. The convergence process observed until the late seventies was exhausted onwards in coincidence with important changes in the economic activity. The paper shows how these factors would have provoked a regional differenciated response that, despite being important, would have not strengthened the decrease in regional inequalities. We use an alternative and (in our opinion) richer approach to the traditional convergence analysis, where the evolution of the whole regional distribution is what matters and not that of a representative economy. Moreover, when analysing inequalities among regional economies, the geographical space acquire an outstanding role. Hence, we apply spatial association tests and relate them to the convergence analysis.Resum. El avance en el proceso de integración ha aumentado el interés por la evolución de las disparidades económicas entre las regiones de la Unión Europea.El proceso de convergencia observado hasta finales de los setenta parece haberse agotado, coincidiendo con importantes cambios en el desarrollo de la actividad económica. El trabajo muestra como estos factores habrían provocado una respuesta regional diferenciada que, pese a ser importante, no habría contribuido a la disminución de las disparidades. En el trabajo se utiliza una aproximación alternativa a la empleada en el tradicional análisis de convergencia, donde lo que se considera es la evolución de la totalidad de la distribución y no unicamente aquélla de una economía representativa. Adicionalmente, cuando se estudian las disparidades entre economías regionales, el espacio adquiere un papel destacado.Por ello se aplican contrastes de asociación espacial y se relacionan con el análisis de convergencia. KEY WORDS: Convergence, EU regions, Distribution dynamics JEL classification: O40, O52, R12¡Error!Marcador no definido. IntroductionThe topic of regional economic convergence has generated considerable interest in recent years. In the case of the EU this interest has been enhanced by the deepening and widening in the integration process. It is well known that the question of regional economic disparities acquired a relevant status both from an economic and political point of view with the accession of Greece, Spain andPortugal. The performance of these economies since then, as a whole as well as that of each one of their regions, might be seen as an empirical evidence of the impact of the integration process. In this sense, the implementation of the Single European Market and the Economic and Monetary Union might play an important role in the evolution of regional disparities, even though a consensus of their effects is far from being achieved from a theoretical point of view (Abraham and Van Rompuy 1995). In any case, there is a general agreement in the existence of a decrease in regional inequalities (ie convergence) from the fifties to the seventies and a relative stagnation afterwards...

This paper reviews almost four decades of contributions on the subject of supervised regionalization methods. These methods aggregate a set of areas into a predefined number of spatially contiguous regions while optimizing certain aggregation criteria. The authors present a taxonomic scheme that classifies a wide range of regionalization methods into eight groups, based on the strategy applied for satisfying the spatial contiguity constraint. The paper concludes by providing a qualitative comparison of these groups in terms of a set of certain characteristics, and by suggesting future lines of research for extending and improving these methods.

Due to its ageing population and low birth rates, the European Union (EU) will need to import foreign labour in the next decades. In this context, the EU neighbouring countries (ENC) are the main countries of origin and transit of legal and irregular migration towards Europe. Their economic, cultural, and historical links also make them an important potential source of labour. The objective of this paper is to analyse past and future trends in ENC-EU bilateral migration relationships. With this aim, we specify and estimate a gravity model for nearly 200 countries between 1960 and 2010. Next, we use the model to obtain medium-run migration forecasts. Our results show a clear increase in migratory pressures from ENC to the EU in the near future, but probably lower than initially expected.

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