Regional development is a process of enhancing wealth, economic activity, and the quality of life in regions understood as subnational territories. It involves leveraging existing strengths, unleashing untapped potential, and enabling the development of more effective institutions.
A major concern in the region development literature is that the prevailing focus on general structural factors may be ill-equipped to explain specific cases of growth (or decline). This approach uncovers regions with so-called “outlier” characteristics, and further research can potentially identify previously unobserved structural drivers or demonstrate the importance of human agency and the unique combination of conditions that characterize a particular region at a given time.
One prominent development strategy is to build on local strengths and invest in infrastructure, talent, civic leadership, and education. Another is to leverage the local economic potential of global value chains, and promote diversification into high-value activities in order to boost productivity and competitiveness.
Both strategies are linked to the way a region interacts with other regions in terms of the flow of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and labor. Regional development is thus fundamentally a process of openness, and it requires a multidisciplinary approach that takes into account nonlocal connections. These include the way regions connect to other industries and markets through industrial histories, and how they rely on inflows of people and international personal and professional networks for accessing diverse knowledge (Bathelt et al. 2012; Fitjar and Rodriguez-Pose 2011). In addition, it is necessary to study the influence of spatial scale and the complexity of governance on the success or failure of a regional development policy.