Robert Huggins (p), Piers Thompson, Chen Xu, Max Munday

Sebastiano Cattaruzzo

This paper addresses the process of entrepreneurial ecosystem emergence in regions and the mechanisms through which new industrial paths are created in these regions. It focuses on the context of relatively weak and mature economic regions and develops a mode of analysis that considers the role of human agency within the emergence of entrepreneurial ecosystems. This analysis considers the case study of the Cardiff city region in the United Kingdom. The analysis indicates that the revitalisation of economically lagging regions through an entrepreneurial ecosystem approach is likely to be contingent upon a number of important components consisting of: (1) access to potential entrepreneurial agency; (2) the engagement of ‘enlightened’ local political agency; and (3) the formation of a collective agency across entrepreneurial and political agents as well as other relevant stakeholders. These key components may allow regions to foster entrepreneurship in a range of highly productive and technology-based industries through new path creation. The principal processes of entrepreneurial ecosystem emergence are found to consist of the establishment of strategic networks that facilitate the formulation of new and novel entrepreneurial initiatives and interventions. The paper argues that adopting an agency-based approach to analysing entrepreneurial emergence highlights the importance of key human actors in such emergence alongside the role of particular resources, capital and institutions. It is concluded that lagging regions can trigger a process of development through new path creation stemming from the emergence of an entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Francois Hermet (p), Idriss Fontaine

Robert Huggins

Mayotte has been the 101st French department since March 31, 2011 and the 9th Outermost Region of the European Union since March 1, 2014. However, in economic and social terms, Mayotte is still structurally behind the national and European average. It is a two-sided economy, halfway between a developed and a developing country, which characterizes the situation in this island of the Mozambique channel. Mayotte's development logic is exogenous, based on an external and public financial engine. The effectiveness of which is, however, questionable. The last born of the French departments remains the poorest in France and inequalities are increasing. This is due, in particular, to the high level of illegal immigration from the neighboring Comoros, one of the poorest countries in the world. The development differential explains the abundant arrival of illegal Comorians, mostly women whose fertility behavior on the ground significantly influences population growth. In this atypical economic and demographic context, the position of Mayotte in terms of human development is an essential question. This article therefore sets out to characterize the evolution of this relative level of development over the past twenty years. The concept of development is however complex. The most appropriate indicator is probably the UNDP Human Development Index (HDI). As the UNDP does not provide HDI values for non-independent territories such as Mayotte, Goujon and Hermet (2012) undertook this calculation. The authors nevertheless noted the unavailability of statistical data. Like many developing countries, Mayotte's statistical system was for a long time underperforming. Under these conditions, analyzing the evolution of Mayotte's level of development over the last few decades, particularly since the departmentalization of 2011, is unthinkable... unless one turns to alternative means of measuring development whose data are accessible. This is the case with satellite nightlight data. Recently, the scientific literature has highlighted the good predictive capacity of light intensities, captured by satellites from space, in terms of the level of development of economies.
In the end, satellite light data for Mayotte are used to measure development. More specifically, the article is based on the calculation of the Night Light Development Index (Elvidge et al., 2012). The method is based on the calculation of a Gini coefficient to estimate development disparities by combining night light with gridded demographic data. Since this measure constitutes a spatially explicit measure of human development, we then obtain a series that allows us to explicitly understand the situation.

Sebastiano Cattaruzzo (p), Giancarlo Corò

Francois Hermet

This study applies a quantile-based model to estimate the explanatory factors of Erasmus mobility across European regions. The characterization shows how
features associated with top performances for Erasmus attractiveness are the degree of urbaneness, the presence of the capital city, and institutions quality.
Contrarily, less-performing regions are associated to tourism specialization, and they are penalized from being close to “development traps”. The government
quality emerges as a key influence that turns some of the negative features into more attractive ones. Finally, we discuss how to complement the European Erasmus strategy with interventions concerned with the implications of international student mobility on regional development, thus becoming more coherent with a cohesion policy.