Integrated sustainable urban development strategies in the European Union:added value and challenges

This chapter will consider the implementation of integrated sustainable urban development strategies as part of this chapter requirements under the 2014–2020 European Regional and Development Fund regulation. This chapter will reflect on the place-based rationale of the approach and consider the major innovations in the 2014–2020 regulations. It will subsequently consider how Member States have designed and implemented the regulation, particularly focusing on variation between and within member states. The second section of the chapter considers the added value of the provisions at the European level. Added value can be captured in three dimensions: the extent to which new or strengthened strategic frameworks have emerged, the extent to which integrated governance and strengthened implementation capacities have been achieved and the extent to which experimentation and innovation in relation to interventions have taken place. The third part of the chapter will analyse some of the key challenges in relation to implementation of these strategies through European funding streams. These relate to issues around capacity, regulations and governance. The final section will reflect on the lessons that can be learned in relation to the role of integrated place-based strategies to achieve territorial cohesion

Special Economic Zones 20 Years Later

In this paper the authors undertake an ex-post evaluation of whether the special economic zones (SEZs) introduced in Poland in 1994 have been successful in meeting regional development objectives. They evaluate the policy of as many of its objectives as possible: employment creation, business creation (which includes attracting foreign direct investment), income or wage effects, and environmental sustainability. They use different panel data methods to investigate this question at the powiat and gmina levels in Poland during the 1995-2011 period. It is also possible to include numerous controls to reduce the problem of the omitted variables bias such as education level, dependency rates, state ownership, general subsidies and whether the area is urban or rural. The results indicate that SEZs in Poland have been successful in a number of their objectives such as private business creation. The positive effect of the policy however mainly comes through foreign direct investment (FDI), whereas the effects on e.g. investment and employment are small or insignificant. In other areas, such as securing higher income levels and locking firms into the sustainability agenda through the adoption of green technologies and reduced air pollution, the authors find only a small positively moderating effect of the policy on what are traditionally economically disadvantaged areas in Poland that used to be dependent on the socialist production model. Hence, despite high levels of FDI, the zones policy has not managed to overcome the legacy of backwardness or lagging regions. The main policy implication of the paper is that SEZs may be successful in stimulating activity in the short run but the policy must be seen as one of necessary temporality and can therefore not stand alone. Before launching SEZs, policymakers must have plans in place for follow up measures to ensure the longer term competitiveness and sustainability implications of such an initiative. There is a need to understand the connection between the specific incentive schemes used (in this particular case tax incentives were used) and the kinds of firms and activities they attract, including the behavioral models that those incentives promote

The Heterogeneity of FDI in Sub-Saharan Africa How Do the Horizontal Productivity Effects of Emerging Investors Differ from Those of Traditional Players?

This paper analyzes the horizontal productivity effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) from industrialized and developing countries in 10 sub-Saharan African countries. We establish a unique data set by combining data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys that allow us to distinguish between foreign investors from sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. We find strong evidence of horizontal productivity spillovers to domestic firms derived from foreign-firm presence. However, these effects are clearly dependent on domestic firms' absorptive capacity. The largest productivity effects seem to be driven by investors from sub-Saharan Africa. Our analysis also shows that productivity effects differ according to the income level of host countries. Overall, the strongest productivity effects seem to materialize in lower-middle-income countries. These key findings emphasize the increasing importance of emerging investors, beyond the traditional players from industrialized countries, in sub-Saharan Africa

Eroding Support from Below: Performance in Local Government and Opposition Party Growth in South Africa

How does support for opposition parties grow in dominant party systems? Most scholarship on the rise of competitive elections in dominant party regimes focuses on elite defections from the ruling party and coordination by opposition parties as key explanations, but there is less focus on how politics at the local level contributes to opposition victories. This article argues that effective service delivery in local government helps opposition parties grow support in local elections. Examining the case of the Democratic Alliance (DA) in South Africa, this article provides a systematic analysis of local elections and opposition party performance. Using an original data set of electoral, census and spatial data at the lowest electoral unit in South Africa (the ward), this article shows that in the areas where it is the incumbent party, support for the DA grows as the delivery of basic services to non-white households improves, and when DA-run wards outperform the neighbouring ones run by the ruling African National Congress party, support for the DA increases in neighbouring wards. Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of how local politics erode dominant party rule

Special economic zones and the political economy of place-based policies

Special economic zones (SEZs) have a long pedigree in the history of regional policy, given that they deal explicitly with a strictly bounded geographical area artificially delineated from the rest of a country. As a distinct region with separate economic policies for the country surrounding it, SEZs both reflect the institutional nature of the country in which they reside but also are often used as an area for institutional experimentation. Tracing the evolution of SEZs in the modern era beginning in China and working through modern variants of the SEZ concept, this chapter explores special economic zones and the (lack of) animating theories behind their existence, drawing particularly on new economic geography and advances in regional science. More importantly, this chapter explores the functioning of economic relationships within an SEZ and its arrangement of institutions in a small geographic space, trying to understand the relationship of SEZs with the countries which birthed them. Are SEZs a substitute for organically generated institutions of growth, including networks/clusters and agglomeration? Do SEZs succeed in increasing growth or fostering the environment for the building blocks of growth, i.e. human capital, technological progress, or capital accumulation? And do SEZs succeed in forging broader institutional change for other regions of a country? Drawing on classic and recent scholarship in this area, this chapter illuminates the promises and pitfalls of SEZs for regional policy