promoting competitiveness in northern sparsely populated areas · backwash effects – the down...
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Promoting Competitiveness in Northern Sparsely Populated Areas OECD Workshop, Kirkenes, October 1st 2015
Andrew Copus (James Hutton Inst./Nordregio) and Jukka Teräs (Nordregio)
Northern Sparsely Populated areas (NSPA)
Source: Gloersen et al 2005, Northern peripheral, sparsely populated regions in the European Union, Nordregio Report 2005:4
Depleting Regions… Should policy compensate for disadvantage or discover potential?
Source: The State of the Nordic Region 2013, Grunfelder et al, Nordregio Report 2014:1
Too Clever? So, if you hear someone say something along the lines of 'America needs
higher productivity so that it can compete in today's global economy,' never
mind who he is, or how plausible he sounds. He might as well be wearing a
flashing neon sign that reads: I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. Paul Krugman, 1994. Peddling prosperity. New York: W. W. Norton p280
We are not Nobel Lauriat economists…!
…we will use the term “regional competitiveness” in a loose, pragmatic
way…
Mind the gap…. Diagnosis requires both theory and local knowledge…but research and
practice tend to be separate worlds…
Dialogue between researchers and practitioners is usually very fruitful
…those who theorise have a lot to learn from those who live in the NSPA
and struggle with the real-world issues day by day…
Discovering potential requires a correct diagnosis…
Policy decisions should be based on concepts and theories about the economic and social processes they seek to modify = Intervention Logics
Main Points…
• The spectrum of available “intervention logics”
• Smart specialisation strategies – flexible containers for
appropriate intervention logics
• 2 issues particularly important to the NSPA:
i. Backwash effects – neglected downside of city regions
ii. New forms of interaction, and non-geographic proximity
• An empirical example from Scotland
The spectrum of “intervention logics”… available for regional and rural policy in the NSPA…
• Equalisation through compensation for disadvantage
• Regional competitiveness (absolute or comparative advantage)
• Inward investment strategies
• Cities as the engines of growth (growth poles), city regions, FUA,
spread and spill-over effects
• Regional innovation and entrepreneurship strategies
• Assets based local development, (ABCD), territorial cohesion (turning
diversity into strength…)
• Community-based local development (CLLD), with social innovation as
the driver
• Commodification of natural environment public goods
• Etc…..
Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3)
Intervention logic pick ‘n mix…an opportunity for the NSPA?
• A broader more inclusive concept of innovation (not just technological)
– incl. service, social, marketing, innovation…
• Less dependent upon metropolitan research hubs
• S3s are flexible containers, the balance of intervention logics reflects the
specificities of the context
Which intervention logics could be blended in NSPA S3s? o Move away from “traditional” focus on infrastructure and
compensation…
o Accommodate resource based industry and inward investment?
o Commodification of public goods…
o Extended version of City Region approach to tackle “backwash effects”
o Community Led Local Development (CLLD) – perhaps sparsity inhibits
social innovation – but can other forms of proximity compensate?
Backwash effects – the down side of large scale resource-based inward investments…
• Being in a City Region has both positive (spread) and negative (backwash)
effects – at the margin backwash effects dominate.
o Depletion of human capital through selective migration
o “Leakage” of benefits to metro HQs
Policy challenges: - Reduce out-migration from NSPA
- Develop regional supply chains and clusters to retain economic benefits
-Find ways to use surplus energy
- - Backwash -
- -
- Backwash - -
Urban Areas
+ Spread +
+ Spread +
+ Spread + + Spread +
NSPA
New Forms of interaction, different kinds of proximity: A new era of opportunity for the NSPA?
• Death of distance? Weakening of
agglomeration economies?
• A whole new vocabulary –
something seems to be going on….
• Also a hot political issue…
connexity glocalisation
organised proximity distributed economy non-euclidean space
translocal globalisation
• New ICT has selective impact –peripherality
still a very powerful constraint, but partially
reconfigured, presenting a range of new
opportunities for the NSPA…
• In order to understand the subtle shift
which is going on we need analysis of
patterns and trends in economic
performance, distinguishing between
accessible and remoter areas.
An example from Scotland: Monitoring Socio-Economic Performance at small area level
• Small town “performance” declined 2001-
2011
• Rural performance improved
• Accessible rural improvement and small
town decline mainly due to “spread effects”
• Remote rural improvement complex, but at
least partly due to ICT facilitating “non-
spatial proximity”
• Policy implication: Different forms of
intervention appropriate for accessible and
remote areas
http://www.hutton.ac.uk/research/groups/social-economic-and-geographical-sciences/mapping-rural-socio-economic-performance
An example from Scotland: Monitoring Socio-Economic Performance at small area level
• Small town “performance” declined 2001-
2011
• Rural performance improved
• Accessible rural improvement and small
town decline mainly due to “spread effects”
• Remote rural improvement complex, but at
least partly due to ICT facilitating “non-
spatial proximity”
• Policy implication: Different forms of
intervention appropriate for accessible and
remote areas
http://www.hutton.ac.uk/research/groups/social-economic-and-geographical-sciences/mapping-rural-socio-economic-performance
• Smart Specialisation - a helpful concept…
• Backwash - need to recognise, research, and create
policy to ameliorate it
• Proximity (new forms of), acknowledge, monitor and
exploit incremental changes
