6. Industry 4.0, Regional Disparities and Transformative Industrial Policy

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Acknowledgements

The writing of this paper has been supported by the EU Horizon 2020 project MAKERS – Smart Manufacturing for EU growth and prosperity is a project funded by the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Staff Exchange Programme, which is a Research and Innovation Staff Exchange under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, grant agreement number 691192. David Bailey also acknowledges support from the Economic and Social Research Council UK in a Changing Europe Programme UK [grant reference: ES/T000848/1]. Ethical disclaimer: the secondary data used in the paper was collected before the MAKERS project.

Notes

1 See: http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/ [Accessed 2 October 2018].

2 The term, ‘specialisation’ is in a sense misleading as ‘smart diversification’ better represents this line of thinking.

3 This can be challenging. See Bailey and De Propris (2002)⁶ on the 1988 reform of the EU Structural Funds. This gave EU regions an entitlement to participate in the design and implementation of regional policy but some of the weakest regions lacked the institutional capacity to actually access and implement the funds allocated to them. Regional inequalities subsequently increased and only later started to narrow.

4 Enterprises with at least 10 employees, NACE sectors, 2009–2017.

5 Internet skills are measured using a self-assessment approach, depending on how many internet related tasks have been carried out, without these skills being assessed, tested or actually observed. 5 or 6 of the following activities have been done: used search engine, sent mail with attachment, posted messages to chatrooms/newsgroups or online discussion forum, made phone calls, done peer-to-peer file sharing or created a web page. Individuals ages 16–74. Year 2013.