Contributions by Italian scholars to regional science

Abstract

Regional science in Italy has a long tradition marked by the distinctive characteristics of the country, namely the presence of multiple and dynamic medium‐sized cities, a traditional and persistent spatial dualism, and the success of intermediate income regions marked by the presence of SMEs. Particularly the third element has led to the creation of an “interpretative paradigm”—known as “endogenous development,” or “development from below”—today well‐structured and established in the discipline. It is the generator of innovative theoretical concepts and interpretations. These features are interesting and justify the intention of this paper to provide an analysis of the development of regional science through the major innovative contributions of Italian scholars.

Merging macroeconomic and territorial determinants of regional growth: the MASST4 model

“…MASST4 maintains an equilibrium size, obtained as the result of the balance between benefits and costs and makes a step forward by introducing this equilibrium size in the equation explaining agglomeration economies. The last ones depend on equilibrium city size, and on additional important variables, like functions hosted, city-networking skills, one the size of cities located nearby ["borrowed size" in Alonso (1973), reprised in Meijers (2013)], and the functions hosted by nearby cities [the "borrowed functions" concept introduced in Camagni et al (2016), Camagni and Capello (2020)].…”

Urban crisis vs. urban success in the era of 4.0 technologies: Baumol's model revisited

“…This paper aims to conceptually reflect on new growth opportunities for cities, provided by 4.0 technologies, departing from a narrative and speculative approach, and making use of a theory‐based approach and its empirical validation. A way to proceed in this direction is to revisit the Baumol's model (Baumol, 1967), its criticisms and, especially, its version with a dichotomous urban–rural space while putting a renewed emphasis on spatial income distribution rather than on pure production (Aydalot & Camagni, 1986; Behrens et al, 2021; Brueckner & Sayantani, 2022; Camagni & Capello, 2020) (Section 2) and introducing the adoption of 4.0 technologies (Section 3). On conceptual grounds, despite the possible spatial dispersion of service activities generated by 4.0 technologies, urban growth is expected to take place, since the city still prevails over the non‐city in both a production and distribution sense, namely through favourable exchange prices (terms‐of‐trade).…”

Mapping industrial and territorial dimensions for the design of place-based innovation policies: the rationale of the book

“…However, as with all paradigmatic changes, the implementation of this policy model was much more complicated than expected (Capello and Kroll, 2016;Camagni and Capello, 2020). Most notably, the achievement of its goals -mainly the identification of the 'smart domain' in which to look for and encourage an entrepreneurial discovery -emerged as the primary difficulty in the implementation of the new strategy, as the first evaluations of the strategy highlighted (Iacobuci and Guzzini, 2016).…”