ABSTRACT
Higher education is supposed to play an important role in the economic development of countries and regions. On a national level, central governments invest enormous amounts of money in education. From a regional perspective, the choice of location of large educational facilities is often substantiated by regional economic development-type arguments. For instance, in the Netherlands, the establishment of universities in Twente and Maastricht was supposed to provide a new impulse to the regional development of areas of industrial decline (textiles in the Twente area and mining in Limburg). However, the empirical evidence supporting this role is not very strong (Florax 1992; Vermeulen 1996). In this chapter, I will explore the role played by (higher) education in regional development and put education on the regional development ‘map’ again.
