Designing Smart Specialization Policy: relatedness, unrelatedness, or what?

Ron Boschma ()

No 2128, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: A key objective of Smart Specialization Strategies (S3) is to stimulate related diversification in European regions, rather than unrelated diversification. This chapter will outline the pros and cons of S3 with a prime focus on either related or unrelated diversification. We argue it depends on the specific regional situation which type of S3 to pursue. While there are good reasons to promote related diversification in general, regions may become over-specialized or trapped in a low-complex economy that might warrant a S3 focus on unrelated diversification.

Keywords: Smart specialization; related diversification; unrelated diversification; regional diversification; complexity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O25 O38 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09, Revised 2021-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-ino, nep-isf, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg2128.pdf Version September 2021 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:egu:wpaper:2128

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).