Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

The Russian Federation's regions not only have highly uneven degrees of development, they also have very uneven degrees of foreign orientation. Regions with the highest foreign orientation-exports of goods per capita or inbound foreign direct investment per capita-almost across the board have the highest standard of living; and those with the lowest foreign orientation generally have the lowest. In this paper, the Russian federal regions are grouped into three categories-lagging, middle-range, and leading-according to real per capita gross regional product. Leading regions seem to be those specialized in mineral exports; lagging regions are not. In addition, the richest regions tend to have high per capita exports, high foreign direct investment, or both; middle-range regions with relatively higher incomes often have high per capita non-mineral exports. Russia's lagging regions have much more tenuous international engagements than the rest of Russia in exports and foreign direct investment. These findings suggest that foreign orientation is an important determinant of socioeconomic development and could be an important item on Russia's regional policy agenda. Such policies might have a variety of objectives: (1) earning income (export goods in which Russia has traditionally had a comparative advantage); (2) diversification and economic stability (minimize risk from drops in oil prices or crises in individual markets and add exports for which demand is likely to be steady over the medium term); (3) technological upgrading (move to more sophisticated goods with greater innovation content); and (4) regional development (promote the uplift of lagging regions). Each of these motives has a different profile of goods exported, regions, and most closely associated destination markets.

Exports --- FDI --- Regional Development

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This paper investigates regional disparities in access to healthcare, measured by self-reported unmet medical needs. It looks at disparities across 86 regions in 5 European countries: Czech Republic, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. The results show that in addition to individual factors, such as age, gender, health status, or education, the characteristics of the region where people live, such as the average skill endowment or employment rate, have a significant impact on the probability of unmet medical needs. Individual and regional determinants play different roles across regions in these five countries. Moreover, in three of these countries (Czech Republic, Italy and Spain), age and chronic illness have different impacts on unmet medical needs depending on the region of residence, when all the other conditions are kept the same. The result calls for further investigation on regionalspecific factors that could be modified with targeted policies in order to reduce the probability of foregone health care.

Urban, Rural and Regional Development

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This paper discusses the use of outcome indicators for policy monitoring. In addition to providing general recommendations on their design and implementation, it makes two contributions to the existing literature. First, it shows the importance of distinguishing outcome indicators from other types of indicators and demonstrates the need to develop clear policy objectives as a prerequisite for meaningful outcome indicators. Second, it analyses the use of outcome indicators in specific settings; on the sub-national level, in multi-level governance frameworks and in the context of EU cohesion policy. The paper argues that outcome indicators are better used in relational contracts than in transactional contracts between governments. Furthermore, it highlights the need to harmonise different monitoring frameworks within an administration.

Urban, Rural and Regional Development

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This paper investigates regional disparities in access to healthcare, measured by self-reported unmet medical needs. It looks at disparities across 86 regions in 5 European countries: Czech Republic, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. The results show that in addition to individual factors, such as age, gender, health status, or education, the characteristics of the region where people live, such as the average skill endowment or employment rate, have a significant impact on the probability of unmet medical needs. Individual and regional determinants play different roles across regions in these five countries. Moreover, in three of these countries (Czech Republic, Italy and Spain), age and chronic illness have different impacts on unmet medical needs depending on the region of residence, when all the other conditions are kept the same. The result calls for further investigation on regionalspecific factors that could be modified with targeted policies in order to reduce the probability of foregone health care.

Urban, Rural and Regional Development

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This paper provides, for the first time, estimates of subjective well-being variables in 373 OECD subnational regions, allowing comparison of various measures of how people experience and evaluate their lives within and across all 34 OECD countries. Different weighting strategies as well as several robustness checks have been carried out to ensure regional representativeness and to provide reliable indicators. The results show that it is possible to obtain robust regional estimates of subjective well-being through the Gallup World Poll for the variables satisfaction with life and social support network. These estimates could be included in the OECD Regional Well-Being Database to provide two additional well-being dimensions measured uniquely with subjective indicators. In addition to these two variables, the paper explores the feasibility of other subjective indicators, either from Gallup or the European Statistics on Income and Living Standards (EU SILC), which are particularly meaningful when measured at the city or regional levels, such as satisfaction with the living environment, satisfaction with commuting time, trust in the political system, and feeling of safety in the community. Finally, a regression analysis is performed to give an insight of the explanatory power of both individual and regional specific characteristics to self-reported life satisfaction. The results show that regional fixed effects capture around 10 percentage points of the variation in life satisfaction, of which 30% can be associated to observable regional characteristics such as mortality rate and air pollution. Furthermore, life satisfaction tends to be negatively affected not only by the individual unemployment status but also by the level of unemployment of the region; in the OECD area, everything else equal, being unemployed is associated with 7 percentage points less of life satisfaction compared to someone that is employed; whereas, an increase of 1 percentage point in the unemployment rate at the regional level is related with 0.4 percentage points less of satisfaction with life as a whole.

Urban, Rural and Regional Development