Laura de Dominicis (p), Hedvig Norlén, Eleni Papadimitriou, Lewis Dijkstra

Diana Cibulskiene

In some EU regions women are able to flourish, while in others they languish behind. This work presents two regional indices: the Female Achievement Index and the Female Disadvantage Index. They reveal in which regions women are achieving more and in which women are at a disadvantage compared to men. The two indices are based on 33 indicators grouped into seven domains. The work shows that, on average, women in more developed regions are able to achieve more and are at less of a disadvantage, while most women in less developed regions face big challenges. Within countries, women in capital regions tend to achieve more and are at less of a disadvantage. In general, regions with a lower female achievement index have a lower gross domestic product per capita, while regions with a higher level of female achievement have a higher level of human development. Finally, the quality of government is higher in regions where women achieve more.

Peter Merza (p)

Laura de Dominicis

In September 2020, the Hungarian Government issued an act in which government commissioners were appointed to implement a new economic development programme for the Hungarian regions, the 'Economic Development Zone' programme was launched. The legislative act described general tasks both for the zones and for the commissioners, however the objective of the programme was ambitious and unique compared to the last 15-20 years government initiated programmes: the aim was to support lagging behind regions in their process of economic renewal, in the process of FDI attraction and to dinamize their local economies'.

Since the 1990's numerous programmes and bodies were launched and formed with similar mission in Hungary and practically all of them dissolved in the course of time, not just without sustainable results, but without any results at all. The most successful predecessor of the zone programme was the easteblishment of the 'regional development councils and agencies' in the early 2000's and the most ambitious was the launch of the 'growth pole programme' in 2005.

The central aim of the paper is to compare this new programme with the previous attempts and to show, that the success of economic development (on the NUTS 2 level) requires much more resources, more systematic-planning and a ompletely new attitude, which the programme lacks at present.

As a conclusion, the paper gives detailed recommendations on how to continue the programme, (if the new parliament after the April 2022 elections in Hungary decides so).

Luca Bettarelli, Davide Furceri, Fabio Mazzola, Pietro Pizzuto (p)

Peter Merza

The steady rise in global average surface temperature and the severity of climate shocks—ranging from heatwaves and droughts to hurricanes and coastal flooding—have raised the urgency of national and international policy actions to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy (IPCC, 2018; OECD/IEA, 2018; Cohen et al. 2022).
While the economic effects of climate change and related policy actions to contrast its negative consequences have been widely assessed at the national level (see for example Wiedenhofer et al., 2020 and Haberl et al., 2020 for a broad review of studies), existing studies have often overlooked their likely heterogeneous effects across regions.
This intuition is indeed gaining consensus among scholars and policymakers. For example, the IMF (2019) warns that “climate change may further exacerbate subnational regional disparities in many advanced economies by the end of the 21st century. This conclusion is based on two findings. First, estimates of the effect of temperature increases on sectoral labor productivity— agriculture, industry, and services—at the subnational level indicate that agriculture and industry are likely to suffer, even in advanced economies. Second, because lagging regions tend to specialize in agriculture and industry the negative effect of global warming on labor productivity may be larger in lagging regions, therefore pushing them to fall behind even more by the end of the 21st century.”
Moreover, although regional growth and resilience are strictly affected by regional endogenous characteristics (see Capello, 2009, Martin and Gardiner, 2019; Mazzola and Pizzuto, 2020; for a broad review of studies), it is increasingly recognized that the factors determining regional performance, should not be found only in each region’s endogenous endowments but are also associated with some pervasive peculiarities of the national economy and its general performances and policies (Camagni and Capello, 2010; Furceri, Mazzola and Pizzuto 2019; Agnello et al. 2016).
Starting from this intuition, this paper investigates the potential trade-off between reducing emissions and the economic costs of climate change mitigation policies. More specifically, we analyze to what extent policy decisions related to climate change (in terms of carbon pricing, environmentally related tax revenues, emission limit values, and so on) can affect regional economic and green performances and the channels through which this occurs.

Diana Cibulskiene (p), Mindaugas Butkus, Lina Garsviene, Janina Seputiene

Pietro Pizzuto

This research contributes to the limited literature on the factors conditioning the turning point of the public debt–growth relationship. A decade after the global financial crisis, when the debt ratio in many countries was still above pre‐crisis levels, the COVID‐19 pandemic again increased the pressure on public finances. It revived the debate on the ability to promote economic recovery through debt‐financed government expenditure. However, more intense government borrowing increases its costs and uncertainty about future taxation policy, thus potentially disturbing private consumption, investment, and economic growth. In this paper, we estimate the thresholds of indicators on which the expenditure multiplier depends, which may already imply a risk that public debt will dampen economic growth. We use a methodology of structural threshold regression to examine the varying effects that debt might have on growth using consumption, investment, taxes, and imports as threshold variables, as well as several other factors suggested by previous contributions. The applied methodology allows for the addressing of parameter heterogeneity and endogeneity to be accounted for at the same time. The main results suggest that a positive debt effect is more likely if the conditions for a high expenditure multiplier are met, that an increase in the public‐debt‐to‐GDP ratio is not necessarily deleterious to growth if shares of private consumption and investment in GDP are high, while the tax‐revenue‐to‐GDP ratio is low.
However, we stress that these results need to be interpreted with caution, as threshold values were estimated for a sample of countries that includes both developed and developing ones. Another limitation is that we do not estimate the joint effect of consumption, investment, tax revenue, and imports on the debt–growth relationship. For example, if two factors are favorable for a higher expenditure multiplier value, e.g., both investment and consumption shares in GDP are high, then one can expect a higher taxes to GDP threshold value. Despite these limitations, we recommend that fiscal policymakers at least monitor the dynamics of consumption, investment, and taxes as a share of GDP, aiming to forecast the effectiveness of expansionary public spending using borrowed funds.