3. Geographical Accessibility and Human Capital Accumulation

This chapter performs a preliminary empirical exploration of the key conceptual links developed in Chap. 2. It looks at the relationship between innovation and regional growth by means of an empirical model that explicitly accounts for the impact of spatially mediated processes (geography) and place-specific socio-institutional conditions. The cross-sectional analysis, covering the EU-25 regions, sheds light on how regional innovative activities influence differential regional growth patterns. The thrust of the analysis will be to examine how geographical accessibility and human capital accumulation, by shaping the regional system of innovation, interact with local innovative activities, thereby enhancing (or impeding) economic growth. The analysis will support the idea that an increase in innovative effort is not, per se, necessarily or likely to produce the same effect in all EU-25 regions (as the linear model would predict), whereas geography, together with human capital accumulation, does, on the contrary, influence this relationship and shall be shown to do so. This will constitute the first empirical confirmation for the theoretical hypotheses developed in the previous chapter, and which will be further analysed in Chaps. 4 and 5 with a more in depth treatment of respectively systems of innovation conditions and geography.