Valér Veres (p), József Benedek, Ibolya Török

Ana Claudia Laprovitera Arruda

The controversies on the measurement of regional development span from the selection of indicators to the role of spatial context. Our paper adds to this debate, its main purpose being to elaborate a multidimensional composite index for measuring socio-economic development in Romania in territorial profile. The defined dimensions, comprised each in a sub-index, are: (1) population dynamics, (2) economy and labour market, (3) education, (4) social conditions of housing, and (5) health situation, comprising 18 social, educational and economic indicators. Indicators within each subindex/dimension, depending on their performance, were computed with Principal Component Analysis associated with better outcomes. Subsequent to this, each dimension (sub-index) is weighted, and then aggregated in the final composite index for the years 2000 and 2019. The main results of the paper are represented by a new multidimensional index of socio-economic development that is the Population, Economic, Education, Social and Health (PEESH) Development Index, which was used for determining the development dynamics of Romanian counties (NUTS3 units on EU level).

Alina Schoenberg (p), Florian Bartholomae

Valér Veres

This paper primarily concentrates on identifying whether innovation activities and differences in economic structure have helped prevent or overcome the economic downturn in German shrinking cities by challenging the widely assumed parallelism between demographic and economic development. Based on the city typology by Bartholomae et al. (2017) who suggest that urban shrinkage is as a combination of both, population and economic decline, while showing that some cities manage to enhance economic growth despite losing population, our estimation is carried out using a probit estimation model. This approach allows predicting the factors related to innovation and economic structure that increase the probability of generating growth in cities with population loss.

Ana Claudia Laprovitera Arruda (p)

Alina Schoenberg

Starting from the concept of corporate territories and structural poverty, this article aims to analyze the effects of neoliberal policies of the last 40 years in Latin American and Brazilian economies as well as to propose a developmental agenda for Brazil, in the post-COVID-19 pandemic, for generations to come. The new post-Covid division of labor, which is imposed by innovative elements (technoscience, information technology, capital profitability, consumption, finances), has been spreading all over the planet in a relentless and violent way. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the incessant strength of the market, science and technology and the need to rethink the new International Division of Labor and its repercussions on the territorial division and on the urban environment. The current technical informational system reaches everyday life in an extraordinary way. This expansion has been exerting great impacts on the reorganization of territories, where companies start to take advantage of data and information production through algorithms via an increasingly ascending and dominant Artificial Intelligence-AI, deepening and diversifying the territorial division of labor, accentuating the inequality to a higher extent in the most diverse territorial scales, especially in peripheral countries, with their even more fragile peripheries. It is urgent to search for an inclusive developmental agenda, with the effective participation of the State in the sense of mitigating these effects and building national and regional integration policies.