Young-chool Choi, Seung-Jong Lee, Young-Hwa Kee (p), Youngkyun Oh

It is generally accepted that the ultimate goal of government is to enhance the happiness of its citizens and, at the same time, to strengthen national development. In achieving these two objectives, business organizations in particular have a crucial role to play. Business provides goods and services for human needs. Business determinants which affect business activities at national level influence both national development and the happiness of citizens. It is assumed here that the degree to which happiness levels may be affected by business may be different in developing from in developed countries. It is crucial for policymakers in both developing and developed counties to understand that citizens’ happiness levels may be affected by different combinations of business determinants. Against this background, this paper categorizes countries into two groups according to certain criteria, in order to discover the configurations of business determinants associated with happiness, to compare these, and to discover the policy implications for each country.

This paper is based on the assumption that the configurations of business determinants affecting happiness may differ in developing and developed countries. Accordingly, it attempts to compare these configurations as they operate in developing and developed countries at national level. In doing this, it classifies countries into two groups according to certain criteria. It then analyses the relationships between happiness and business determinants by group, using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Specifically, this study focuses on discovering the different configurations of business determinants that influence happiness at national level in developing and developed countries. It is hoped that its findings may provide individual countries with policy-related and practical information concerning how their happiness levels may be enhanced through consideration of their own processes of economic development.

Sjoerdje Charlotte Van Heerden (p)

The most recent European Structural and Investment funding period (2014-2020) empowers cities to directly manage, implement and finance their Sustainable Urban Development (SUD) strategies. In addition, two new territorial instruments support the integrated approach to urban and territorial development: Integrated Territorial Investment (ITI) (and Community-led Local Development (CLLD). These measures not only acknowledge that cities are key in resolving sustainability issues, but also the importance of integrated place-based approaches.
The URBADEV database provides a visual overview of all SUD/ITI strategies currently implemented across Europe. The database shows the strategies at three different levels: European, national and regional (NUTS3). Also, different aspects of the strategies are presented, such as size of population targeted, thematic focus, funding arrangements, governance structure, and implementation mechanism. Together these different features form a unique knowledge base on urban and territorial strategies for sustainable development that are supported by EU provisions and tools. In addition to the general overview, a selection of strategies is presented in more detail.
The URBADEV database is publicly available and falls under the umbrella of the European Commission’s Knowledge Center for Territorial Policies (KCTP). Similar to the KCTP, URBADEV aims to foster knowledge sharing, policy learning, and data improvement. In specific, URBADEV addresses the critical nexus between policy principles and practice. Therefore, it aims to contribute to better EU support to cities and regions that have committed themselves to sustainable development. However, URBADEV also serves as a tool for academics, non-European policy makers, and all others who take interest in the topic.

Annie Tubadji (p), Pierpaolo Pattitoni, Peter Nijkamp

Language is often treated in economics as a type of skill on which the individual’s success in networking and communication as well as cognitive skill development depends. Economics seems to generally overlook language as a local cognitive constellation which is an aggregate endowment for a place or region and reflects the collective mind in the locality and its state. This paper takes its starting point from two earlier definitions of language as a verbal culture (Skinner 1957) and a culture as a programming of the mind (Hofstede and Bond 1988). Our main hypothesis is that the local programming of the collective mind can be traced in certain verbal behavior patterns over time and these linguistic patterns describe a Foucauldian discourse. Such a discourse can serve as one of the mechanisms for predicting local economic growth. The question how the programming of the mind is set – whether it is a constant, an oscillating value or a flow variable – is the focus of our first statistical exploration. In addition, we set to examine two aspects of these linguistic patterns: (i) the causal direction of their relationship with local economic growth and (ii) the nature of the process of their influence on growth, distinguishing between persistence, resilience and path dependence. Finally, we consider the fact that linguistic patterns follow normally a Zipf-law of distribution, while local urban development patterns are often argued to follow a Gibrat law, the two distributions being somewhat similar, except for their tails. We question the causal economic and statistical significance of this similarity in the case of the cultural roots of language and agglomeration effects. We use the unique Google dataset – a panel of a representative sample of world libraries in English language – to capture linguistic patterns. This dataset covers the last 200 years of world libraries and we augment the linguistic information with the World Wealth and Income data on economic inputs and outputs over the same period of time. Our results demonstrate that language is confirmed as a measure of local culture, more specifically, the change in culture is a measure for change in the cultural ‘milieu’ and is predictive for changes in local socio-economic development.