Nils Karl Sørensen (p), Andreas P. Cornett (p)

Alteration of the inter- and intraregional balance in countries is not a new phenomenon, but it seems that the speed of changes has increased during the last decades.
The purpose of the current paper is to shed some new light on this process based on a long term study of Denmark. From the outside, Denmark seems to be a very homogenous country with rather limited regional disparities. A closer look unveils a different picture. Based on a variety of indicators (GDP per capita, employment, disposal income & industrial structure) the framework reported in this paper digs deeper into the issue.
The first part of the main section of the paper provides a brief overview of the regional development in Denmark since the regional policy and development became a formalized policy issue in the late 1950’s. This section is based on a review of literature and governmental reports. The second part of this section provides an attempt to identify the main drivers of the identified trends based on relevant theoretical concepts.
The third section is digging deeper into the long and short term alterations in Denmark, with special attention on the importance of internal (changes of institutional settings, development of business and industries) and external factors (EU programs, economic cycles and impacts of globalization). The analysis is based on the above mentioned indicators and a regional division taking the institutional changes into consideration. The data are analyzed longitudinal as well as cross-sectoral aiming at to identify and evaluate the turning points of long and short term trends.
The final section summarizes the results and provides a first assessment of the relative importance of short and long term tendencies as well as of internal vs. external drivers for the regional balance.

Pawel Gajewski (p), Ageliki Anagnostou

The paper investigates the impact of monetary policy shocks on regional and sectoral economic variables in Poland in the period 2000 - 2013. The regional level responses to monetary policy shocks are estimated with Bayesian Panel VAR models, developed by Canova and Ciccarelli (2004). This method allows us to combine the benefits of panel models and the VAR framework and model the entire panel of the Polish NUTS-2 regions through the imposition of a shrinkage prior. We document large regional and sectoral variation in monetary policy transmission mechanism. Our results support previous findings that the differential regional effects of monetary policy are significantly related to the industrial composition. However, even though sectoral effects are found to be more important for the variation in interest sensitivity than regional effects, the latter are also found to be non-negligible. Additionally, we explore whether sectors which react more strongly to interest rate shocks are compensated by higher returns and seek the origins of the regional asymmetric responses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to unveil regional differences in monetary policy effects in a CEE country.

Susana Suárez (p)

Challenges and opportunities for regional policy in Mexico
Susana Suárez Paniagua
In Mexico, the regions have long been experiencing great economic and social disparities, which are expressed in the different levels of per capita income, family income, average schooling, housing, social services, infrastructure, transportation; institutional development, social participation, among other items. In recent years, these regional disparities have been maintained or deepened within the framework of the globalization process, which is characterized by the transnational reorganization of production, the globalization of markets. A process that has led to the appearance of winners and losers, included and excluded from this economic dynamic. Undoubtedly, the regional policy that the Mexican Government has designed and implemented has had negative or positive effects to address and reduce these territorial asymmetries. Currently this policy responds to a model of national development based on neoliberal economic policy, consequently, regional policy is characterized by a reduction of the intervention of the State, the deployment of exogenous strategies of investment, among other actions; with little encouraging results in the reduction of territorial asymmetries.
Mexico faces serious problems of design and execution today to face the new challenges of national development on the world stage, especially by the arrival of a new government in the United States that has raised the withdrawal of US investments in our country, and new negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement. These approaches and actions imply challenges for Mexico in terms of trade, security, economic growth, and fight against poverty, among others. Challenges that force the State to rethink the development course of the country and with this to a new conception and instrumental design of a regional policy that promotes essential processes of economic and social competitiveness of its different regions and of the country as a whole, attenuating the asymmetries. Hence our interest in analyzing the regional policy that has been deployed by the Mexican government in recent years and contrasting it with the regional policies of the European Union, to examine the mechanisms that can trigger regional development processes, which can be taken into account in the imperative construction of a new design and implementation of regional policy. This analysis constitutes the purpose of this work.
Keywords: Policy and regional development