J. Andrés Faíña Medín (p), Jesus Lopez‐Rodriguez, Paulino Montes‐Solla

The European Union Cohesion Policy has channelled an important amount of investments aimed at reducing development gaps among the regions by reinforcing the main regional growth drivers (Infrastructure, Research and Development (R&D), Information and Communications Technology (TIC), and human capital). This paper analyses the pattern of economic growth in Spain in the light of the Cohesion Policy (CP) investments carried out over the period from 1989 to 2010 with the aim of distinguishing between a process of capital widening versus one of capital deepening. We had built a regional panel dataset for the 17 Spanish regions (Autonomous Communities) over the period from 1989 to 2010 to estimate two versions of an extended Cobb-Douglas production function with public capital generated by the investments in public infrastructure (transport, telecommunications, energy, water, sanitation, etc.) prompted by the European Union Cohesion Policy.
In this paper, we report three main results: a) a persistent decline in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) at an average cumulative rate of over 1% during this period, b) the biggest contributors to labour productivity are private and human capital and c) the impact of infrastructure on labour productivity only becomes positive after conditioning the regional infrastructure level by a saturation index.

Claudia Ionescu (p)

In this article I would like to provide a new and more flexible model on sustainable development. It is based on the examination of different models of sustainable development. The analysis of the different models of sustainable development and strategies provided the basis for the new view of sustainable development.

The research question for this paper is: What is the cohesion policy contribution at the sustainable development of the capital region?

Finding the answers for this specific questions of the article, consequently we could find answers for the main question of the article. from above and for the main question of the article.

Sustainable development could be an endless source of human and institutional innovations at the regional, national as well as the global level.

The global debate aroused by sustainable development could be considered with more acuity, since a consensus was not reached on the targeted objectives, on the responsibilities of different agents and of political, economic, but also legal and cultural tools, necessary for the reinvention of a theoretical corpus on which can stand renewed practices as regards global governance and environment preservative technology policies.
Some of the documents used are statistical data provided by UN, UNDP, World Bank, OECD, European Union’ institutions, EUROSTAT etc; in order to provide comparative analyses and links among European regions. During the research for the thesis the internal information available in the RDA’s was used by taking into consideration the author position as manager in the RDA BI (since 1999) and experiences from the academic field (since 2003).

I consider that the key of a change in consumption and production behaviours allowing to capture globally these issues of sustainable development lies in education and awareness on environmental and socio-economic impacts of widening inequalities within and between countries and in the need to address it in the framework of democratic debates at the local, national and global levels.
In this paper, I proposed a new model (perspective) of sustainable development and a new set of indicators. In this research, the human element is the engine of development, more specific a key element of achieving a balanced and equitable sustainable development in the world, in general, and in the EU in particular.

Agnes Pal (p)

The geography of border zones deals with the interrelatedness of the elements of border and other components of spatial and economic relations and it describes the processes by which national borders come into existence and how they dissolve, what their political significance is and to what extent national borders influence local people and regional economy. It is also important to consider that some of these factors have a combined influence. Consequently, the relationship between borders and their regions is mutual and changeable. Thus the topic of research is the national border itself and its socio-economic environment. Since border zone research is of interdisciplinary nature it has great many auxiliary sciences, including political and military geography, traditional economic geography, population and urban studies, demography as well as philosophy.
The border zone research has become one of the most important objectives in geographical investigations in Hungary.
In the first phase of their research geographers formulated the academic problem itself; that is, whether or not border zone settlements develop differently from those settlements which are locatcd in other parts of the country. Border zone location supposedly has an - advantageous or disadvantageous - impact on the development of a given settlement. In the next phase of the research - between 1991-1994- empirical research was carried out. Statistical analyses and surveys through questionnaires were made in relation to the areas and settlements located in the vicinity of the Rumanian-Serbian-Hungarian borders This research was primarily aimed at exploring the economic relations of these settlements, and, as a result, the conclusion was drawn that in most cases border zone location is favorable when a developed region meets another relatively developed region. If the two sides of the border are both underdeveloped, that is, poverty meets poverty, or there is a considerable developmental gap between the settlements located on the two sides of the border, border zone location is only to preserve the peripheral characteristics of the given settlement.