RECONCILING COHESION AND COMPETITIVENESS THROUGH EU CLUSTER POLICIES?

Abstract

This article examines the compatibility of the Lisbon objectives with the EU's long-standing concerns for social, economic and territorial cohesion. In particular, the Commission's policy agenda has been driven since the reform of the Structural Funds in the late 1980s by the concern to improve regional welfare in view of enabling socio-economic convergence across regions and Member States, and, with the introduction of the Lisbon Agenda, of contributing to EU overall competitiveness in the global economy. The article argues that the tension between the (micro-economic element of the) growth and jobs agenda, and the long-standing socio-economic cohesion aims cannot be solved by policies that target either sectors or regions, but can be better reconciled with renewed attention to creating, nourishing, and strengthening immobile factors of local development and competitiveness especially for lagging regions. This would imply ‘bottom–up’ cluster policies aimed at improving the welfare of socio-economic communities by creating the conditions for the systemic and integrated functioning of their socio-institutional-economic activities.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to David Bailey and two referees of this journal for useful comments and suggestions. All errors remain her own.

Notes

1. In some EU documents the budget is calculated at 2004 prices and amounts to [euro]864.3 billion.

2. Such policies are implemented through programmes such as the 7th Framework Programmes (research and technology), the Lifelong Learning Programme, Trans-European Networks (TENs) for transport and energy, and Galileo (worldwide satellite navigation system).

3. The remainder of the EU budget will be mainly spent on the Common Agricultural Policy and other items of expenditure unrelated to competitiveness and cohesion (Grybauskaite, 2007).

4. See also follow up discussion in Regional Studies, vol. 39, no. 7, 2005, in particular the Sapir Group (2005), Hall (2005), Dunford (2005) and Gardiner et al. (2005).

5. For an application of cluster policy to specific countries, see Drejer et al. (1999) on Denmark, Lundequist and Power (2002) on Sweden, and Roelandt et al. (2000) and Raines (2001) on a cross-regional comparison.

6. For a discussion on implicit and explicit policy, see Fromhold-Eisebith and Eisebith (2005).

7. See McDonald et al. (2007) on international networks of local industries to promote and sustain competitiveness.

8. See Bailey (2003) on the auto ‘cluster’ in Britain which crosses at least five English regions, raising issues of how separate regionally-based cluster policies are joined up, if at all.