Disentangling regional policy paradigms: Using eTools to understand and compare the impact of regional development policies in the European Union

Regional development has often been described in economic terms, using economic indicators such as growth in GDP or demographic indicators such as net migration or employment. Some researchers argued that regional development should be understood broader, by including for example social indicators and living environment indicators . Recently, researchers have shown that policies directed towards regional development have broadened as well , but are also still evaluated within specific narratives or frameworks that often constitute the goals of the policy, for example the Keynesian framework favours increasing demand and favours the evaluation of policies aimed at exactly this. This self-constituting practice of an amalgam of related policies has also been referred to by Hall as a policy paradigm. Because policies are often evaluated within these policy paradigms it becomes difficult to decontextualise them, disentangle them and compare policies with each other.
In this paper we propose to use a different, more quantitative and comparative method. By applying the above mentioned work from Andy Pike on numerous data sources from EUROSTAT and OECD, researchers from the PREMIUM_EU project developed a new framework that is measuring Regional Development (dubbed “R”) using economic, social and living environment indicators.
Method
By regarding this “R” (and individual indicators) as an outcome of public policies on the local, regional, national and international level and by analysing regional development policies on different levels from 2010 and onwards we believe it is possible to understand the impact of these policies in a more evidenced based sense, regardless of the above mentioned different types of narratives or frameworks.
We started our research with an analysis from the OECD on the different types of regional development policies and the relations between different levels of government within countries. Based on this and literature research, we developed a framework with relevant topics for regional development policies and different levels of government.
Based on the work of Moritz Schütz presented during the ERSA 2024 conference, we developed and employed a webcrawler to automatically download and summarise policies from municipalities, regional and national authorities and analyse the results of this exercise.
Findings/results
The webcrawling and -mining exercise in combination with the new set of indicators will offer a much broader and more comprehensive view of the use and necessity of regional development policies. The findings will be discussed in dedicated policy labs with policymakers and researchers from the respective regions.
Discussion/conclusions
Both the new set of indicators and the analysis of the policies are not only innovative, but will also be viewed as speculative. Although we believe that a direct causal relationship between policies and the regional development will be hard to uncover, we do believe that this research will move the field of policy analysis forward, because it is more focused on evidence-based indicators and is based on larger sets of policies.