engleski

Functional Economic Areas, Centres, Periphery and Networks: A Bibliometric Analysis

Regions and regional policy in contemporary economy, no matter how (under)developed economy is, have significant place and role. Reduction of regional disparities is crucial in terms of social justice and for national economy to be more economic efficient, but with emphasise of region's resource usage. In this framework, the centre-periphery scheme represent a commonly accepted paradigm, despite the relative theoretical issues, including the multidimensionality of social activities and the rescaling of the relations among places. At the same time every spatial partition - and the relative boundaries – address the creation of some network and reduce the creation of innovative ones. The different networks could grow and operate among different scales, including multiple variables and, therefore, different geographies. So, policies oftent could reproduce marginalization process, reinforcing the peripheries status or creating new ones. According to this conceptual framework, the paper will focus on the EU policies that could help pe- ripheries not remain one. The paper aims to analyze if (and how) the EU approach participates in the center-periphery relations and how the use of relative parameters and region boundaries can create – rather than reduce – peripheries moving from the empirical evidence of the Croatian regions. In this respect, to analyze the phenomenon, a bibliometric analysis of the literature in regional development and economy in the context of Central and Eastern Europe and EU 27 is proposed. In this respect, the bibliometric analysis proposed combines a theoretical analysis into a statistical one. To identify the literature relevant concepts considering the proximity of the relevant literature topics, we will consider an approach based on clustering analysis. In this sense, we discover relevant biblio-metric clusters and separate these economically relevant data structures from the ''noise''. These data structures show some interesting, relevant economic concepts suitable for summarizing the existing literature and proposing new directions for future research. Simultaneously, the paper aims to propose suggestions regarding the theoretical approach and some directions to broaden the discipline's points of view towards new theoretical horizons.

Center-periphery, regions, regional disparities, regional policy

Rad je izložen na konferenciji International Management Research XVII, bez objave u zborniku radova s konferencije.