REGIONAL ECONOMICS

The course in Regional Economics is one of the activities "Affini ed Integrative" that the student can choose within the Economics and Business Bachelor's Degree programme. The course aims at providing the vocabulary and the essential tools for analysis analysis of economic development within a regional framework. The cours analyses model providing an explanation to the spatial location of activities and to the determinants of the process of regional growth.

1. Knowledge:
1.1. understand the peculiarity arising from explicitly considering space within the explanation of the economic system;
1.2. undestand how households and firms take decisions related to localization of economic activities;
1.3. understand the interconnections between decisions taken by agents acting within the same spatial market;
1.4. understand motivations behind public intervention within urban and regional settings.

2. Skills:
2.1. apply the supply and demand model to understand the spatial location of economic activities;
2.2. apply the proposed model to understand the meaning of specific economic policies.

3. Competencies:
3.1. economic interpretation of land rent and of the functioning of spatial markets;
3.2. understand the role, the merits and the limitations of the considered economic models;
3.3. consider the role of public intervention within a regional setting.

Students must have passed the final exam of the course in Microeconomics.
Students must have reached the instructional goal of the Mathematics course even without having passed the final exam yet. In particular, they must master the cartesian system, be able to solve systems of equations and simple optimization problems.

The first part of the course introduces some principles regulating the spatial location of activities, focussing on the relationships between location and agglomeration, between location and accessibility and between location and hierarchy.
The second part of the course presents some important explanations of the process of regional growth, concentrating on the relationship between local competitiveness, cumulative feedback between demand and supply, and endogenous growth.

Capello R., Economia Regionale. Il Mulino: Bologna, 2015 - chapters 1, 2, 3, 5 (optional: 6, 9, 10)
Notes on regional growth (downloadable from the course material)
Notes on selected lesson topics (downloadable from the course material)

Assessment is based on a written exam consisting on some open-ended questions.

The teaching method consists of:
a) lectures in class;
c) own-learning by the students.

Italian

The detailed programme for the exam and all the mandatory supplementary material will be made available during the course through the moodle area accessible from the lecturer's web page.

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