Valér Veres (p)

Gabriele Cappelli

This paper analyses the economic and social changes and development in Central and Eastern European countries, focusing on the changing position of Romania, after the 1989/90 regime change until 2022, focusing on the period since the Romania’s EU accession. The notion of social changes as development has been operationalised starting from Human Development index, usig the Sen’s multidimensiona concept of development. Data sources own built database, using basic data from UNDP, EUROSTAT on NNUTS 1 and NUTS2 level.
The main research questions of the project are: (1) has Romania's position in the CCE context changed in terms of socio-economic development between 1990 and 2022? (2) What factors have influenced Romania's repositioning in the context of intra-EU and candidate CEE countries in terms of socio-economic development patterns?
Methodologically, these components have been measured by means of different economic and social indicator data series, according to the dimensions of Human Development Index: (1) economic and labour force market, (2) human capital and education indicators, (3) population change and health. The indicators used in the analysis, beside the HDI index and its components we used more indicators for each dimension (like increase in actual individual consumption, Gini index, employment in services, students in tertiary education, healthy life expectancy), using bivariate and multivariate statistical methods, too. Two approaches have been borne in mind: the first one is external comparison whereby we shall analyse the situation of Romania in comparison with Central and Eastern Europe, i.e. in a regional comparison.
For testing the repositioning hypothesis of Romania, we used multiple hierarchical cluster analysis models, using a set of variables of development (HDI component indicators and other variables: According to the results, we can see the change of configuration of the countries between 1995, 2005,2015 and 2020.
According the results, while in 1995 Romania was in the same group with Estonia and Poland. In 2005, after the depression of the 1990ies, it was grouped closely with Bulgaria and Serbia. But after 9 years of EU accession, Romania was closely associated with Croatia, and, on second level, with Hungary and Latvia, so the lower developed Baltic and Visegrad countries, and the distance from non-EU countries increased.

María Sanchis (p), Alicia Gómez-Tello, Maria José Murgui García

Valér Veres

In this paper we adopt a long run perspective to analyze the economic growth of the European regions. We want to observe the impact of agglomeration (population density), jointly with other characteristics associated to modern economic growth (industry share, coal abundance, specialization…), and the importance of spatial dependence in determining GDP per capita growth in the different phases of European growth since 1900 to 2015. Our purpose is to identify potential differences across time and to uncover those forces present in the regions that have persistently placed the top positions in Europe in terms of GDP per levels. We want to answer the question of why some regions rich regions shrink while other persist at the forefront and to explore are the deeper forces of their survival. For that purpose we use the Roses and Wolf’s (2021) datatabase for 173 European regions at Nuts-2 level.

Gabriele Cappelli (p), María José Fuentes-Vásquez

María Sanchis

We build a new dataset of primary as well as technical and vocational education (TVE) across regions of France, Italy, Spain, and Sweden at the NUTS3 level in the period 1870 – 1910. We combine the regional and the comparative perspective to explore the relationship between different types of human capital and economic growth in the period 1870 – 1950 by relying on existing estimates of per-capita GDP across European regions. We find that, during the rise of mass education and the First globalization, basic human-capital accumulation bears little significance for sustaining economic performance. Yet, in the Interwar period (1910 – 1950), a systematic link between education and growth is observed. Furthermore, TVE seems to have strongly driven the rise of incomes, even when controlling for basic schooling and existing human capital stocks (literacy).