The Apulian Ιnnovation Οverview: a knowledge tool for better informed

REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT FUND - REGION OF WESTERN GREECE • CENTRE OF PLANNING & ECONOMIC RESEARCH (KEPE) Special Issues on Regional Entrepreneurship & Innovation Planning

Much like the rest of the country, the region declined economically during the recent eight-year-long recession;4 and like the other twelve NUTS level II Greek regions, is headed by a governor and a council which possess very limited executive (no legislative) powers and rely on the central government for most of the funding. Under the circumstances, the regional authorities (the elected governor and council) assumed a practical strategy to coordinate local efforts, and support and promote entrepreneurship, innovation and economic development via (a) collaborations and (b) a combination of low budget approaches (either novel approaches or approaches already tried and tested in other places) (Prodromidis and Papaspirou, 2018).

As a consequence, identifying how the region is performing in key aspects compared to the other EU regions can be very instructive. So, a new set of indices, regarding Production, Well-being and Development prospects (PWD), consisting of twenty-two individual indices (elements) is prepared. These individual indices focus on: • sectoral employment (ten indices: one for each production sector) and broader production features (three indices for overall labor specialization, productivity, and workers' education); • well-being (four indices for disposable income, jobs,5 people’s education, life expectancy: all featuring in the works mentioned in the Introduction); • development prospects (five indices for market size, demographic composition,

R&D spending, GDP per capita and its rate of change); across EU regions.6

4 During 2008-16, per capita GDP decreased by 26.2%. In Greece it decreased by 24.8%, and in the EU it increased by 12.3%. During 2009-16, the number of unemployed increased 3.03 times. In Greece it increased 2.33 times, and in the EU it decreased by 3%. 5 Even though it is people’s leisure and not work that usually enters the individual’s utility function, we lack non-work time-use measures at the regional level. If at a certain stage leisure (non-work time-use) is an inferior good so that the labor supply schedule may be positively sloped, and increased paid work involvement may reduce social exclusion (Giddens and Griffiths, 2006: 357), then it makes sense to include people’s jobs as crucial for well-being, much like the OECD (2018) and other authors do. 6 Up until 2019 all regions operated under a converging (by and large, the same) legal, funding, export and competition policy framework. In 2020, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the diverse responses of the member-states are bound to upset this pattern. In addition, from 2020 on, the forty-one regions forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) are expected to follow a separate path following the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.