Folke Snickars (p), Maria Ulfvarson

Juan R Cuadrado-roura

In conjunction with a review of international systems for regional development planning and physical planning the current report aims to provide a Nordic comparison of the situation in the middle of 2015. The analysis is based on materials presented in the appendix on international planning systems in the main committee report, see Housing Planning Committee (2015). The descriptions of current conditions in Nordic countries have been scrutinized by experts from the respective country. This was made in conjunction with an international seminar I Stockholm, March 2015. Additional materials have been introduced to make the presentation up to date as a description of the Nordic conditions.

As an introduction we make a short summary of a number of planning activities that have the Nordic cooperation agenda as a basis. Some development programs for the Baltic Sea region are also mentioned. More could be added regarding the different activities performed under the auspices of various EU programs. The most important among these will be regional, social and structural funds as well as programs referring to cross-border cooperation.

The bulk of the presentation deals with the planning systems in the individual Nordic countries. Will similarities or differences dominate when looking at the delineation of the policy areas and their main directions? How are the planning systems built locally and regionally? Are we moving towards a convergence when it comes to the delineation of the policy field in legal frameworks and in practice?

The text is of overview nature and takes a starting point in a shorthand description of the system in each country. Then we discuss administrative subdivisions, municipal and regional reforms, systems for development and physical planning and compare them between countries. In a concluding part of the paper we perform a comparison between Nordic systems for housing and infrastructure planning. The Finnish intentional agreements are put forward as a possible Nordic model.

Marco Bellandi, Annalisa Caloffi (p)

Folke Snickars

Drawing on the two models of the University centric industrial district (Patton and Kenney, 2009) and the Civic University (Goddard and Vallance, 2013), the paper develops a framework on the role of universities in local development processes. Such framework develops around three concepts: first, the degree of synergy between the different activities that are promoted by the university in relation to its third mission, from the implementation of single technology transfer activities to the organization of system-based actions; secondly, the degree of alignment between the goal of the university third mission and projects of local development, from a complete misalignment to a complete alignment that can lead to a sustainable local growth; third, the degree of disciplinary specialisation of university research and third mission activities, from a complete specialisation to a multi-disciplinary attitude. The paper includes some exemplification and a tentative application of the framework on the problems of industrial recovery in Italy.

Juan R Cuadrado-Roura (p), Andres Maroto, Lic Guillermo Garcia-Alonso

Annalisa Caloffi

Improvements in Total Factor Productivity are always associated to economic development. For this reason, the study of TFP is a central topic in economics. More recently, emphasis shifted towards explaining regional inequalities. This is especially important for Spain, whose regions are performing poorly since the mid-90s. To date, every analysis of the productivity of Spanish regions have neglected the important role of geography. To fulfil this lack of research, a measure of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) is derived based on the estimation of Spatial Lag Models for a panel of the Autonomous Communities (1991-2012) and Provinces (1995-2008) of Spain, using data from De la Fuente (2015a; 2015b) and the National Institute of Statistics (INE), respectively. Subsequently, the effects of human capital, knowledge capital and public capital on productivity are explored following a similar methodology. After controlling for spatial autocorrelation, all variables have a positive significant effect on the regional levels of TFP. Furthermore, the results suggest that the spillovers of knowledge capital and public capital are important determinants of the disparities in TFP across Spanish regions. Lastly, the distance range within which productivity spillovers have their major influence is investigated. Particularly, most of the diffusion of productivity takes place between bordering regions.