BAK Basel Economics: International Benchmark Report 2006 - Western Europe: Regions outside metropolitan areas are catching up
2 Documents
Basel (ots)
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The metropolitan areas of Western Europe benefited disproportionately from the dot.com boom in the second half of the 1990s. That effect is now over. The growth lead in urban regions has vanished: between 2000 and 2005, their gross domestic product increased by 1.6% per year, no more than the Western European countries of the EU, Switzerland and Norway taken together. The balance, in terms of growth, between the metropolitan regions and the group of intermediary and rural regions of Western Europe between 2000 and 2005 can be attributed to the following factors:
- The new information and communication technologies continue to drive general economic growth, but now increasingly also in economic regions outside of the metropolitan areas.
- Admittedly, the financial services sector which is concentrated in the cities has recovered following the slump on the stock market in 2000-2003, but the growth is increasingly being seen outside Western Europe.
- The most competitive centres of technology are often to be found away from the big urban areas: they are profiting disproportionately from the investment boom in Asia and North America.
- Regional policies at national and European level have been particularly directed at supporting growth outside the metropolitan regions. Having economic growth more evenly spread geographically is not necessarily a positive thing: new knowledge is primarily generated in the universities in metropolitan areas, and is quickly converted there, in corresponding clusters, into new, profitable products and jobs. Western Europe urgently needs more growth in jobs and value added, this can only be achieved if metropolitan regions take up their leader role again.
The following lists contain samples of the International Benchmark Report 2006, a detailed press release can be downloaded from: www.bakbasel.com.
Contact:
Marc Bros de Puechredon
Tel: +41/79/4070'35'86
E-Mail: marc.puechredon@bakbasel.com