The Cañada-Blanch Centre at LSE brings a new public event. Lewis Dijkstra will discuss about regional development in EU and its consequences in the political arena.
Development traps and discontent
While many regions have flourished in recent decades, many other are stuck —or are at risk of becoming stuck— in development traps. Such regions experience relative decline in economic growth, employment, and productivity relative to their neighbours and to their past economic trajectories. Many of these regions have been in development traps for lengthy periods of time and this growing sense of stagnation among the populations is breeding increasing political discontent and unrest. Such discontent is often translated in the support for anti-system parties at the ballot box.
In this talk, Lewis Dijkstra will study the link between the formation of regional development traps and the rise of discontent in the European Union (EU). He will show that there is a strong connection between being stuck in a development trap and support for Eurosceptic parties. This support is robust to different measurements of the development trap, including the degree of entrapment and the number of years since 2000 that a region has been in a development trap. He will highlight that the longer the period of stagnation, the stronger the support for parties that propose or have proposed radical measures such as the demise of the EU or that of the euro.
Meet our speaker
Dr. Lewis Dijkstra, @DijkstraLewis
Lewis Dijkstra is the Head of the Economic Analysis Sector of the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy in the European Commission. He is the editor the Cohesion Report, which analyses economic, social and environmental issues in EU regions and cities. He is also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.
He works closely with the OECD, the UN, the World Bank, the European Environmental Agency, the Joint Research Centre and Eurostat. His recent work covers topics such as a global definition of cities and rural areas, measuring transport performance, the geography of EU discontent, quality of government and gender equality.
He holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from Rutgers University, New Jersey, an MSc in Urban and Regional Planning from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in Political Science from the University of Ghent, Belgium.
Meet our chair
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is the Princesa de Asturias Chair and a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics. He is the Director of the Cañada Blanch Centre LSE. He is a former Head of the Department of Geography and Environment between 2006 and 2009. He is a past-President of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI) (2015-2017) and served as Vice-President of the RSAI in 2014. He was also Vice-President (2012-2013) and Secretary (2001-2005) of the European Regional Science Association.
More about this event
The Cañada-Blanch Centre at LSE is the vehicle to achieve the objective of the Fundación Cañada Blanch: developing and reinforcing the links between the United Kingdom and Spain. This is done by means of fostering cutting-edge knowledge generation and joint research projects between researchers in the United Kingdom, and at the LSE in particular, on the one hand, and Spain, on the other.
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