Growth Patterns in Global Regions:: Do Specific Success Factors Make a Difference?

Globalisation is not a state of the world but an evolutionary process, which entails the increasing planetary integration of markets for goods and services, markets of location sites for economic activities, markets of production factors as technologies and information. Regions are involved in the globalization process to a different extent depending on their industrial specialization and physical accessibility from outside.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how regions most exposed to globalization face tougher competition. Distinguishing between open and closed regional economies, the paper investigates the regional performance of each type of region and identifies the most important success factors linked to growth performance patterns. The aim of the analysis is to determine whether the role played by each success factor in regional growth changes across regions with different degrees of openness to the rest of the world. Interestingly, our results do not clearly show that more open regions take advantage from particular success factors. The impact of most success factors on regional differential growth, in fact, do not change among groups of regions. A higher average regional growth rate in open regions with respect to closed ones is therefore mainly explained by the regional endowment of success factors rather than by differentiated marginal effects among groups of regions.