ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the importance of specialization, socio-economic factors and regional capabilities to produce and absorb new knowledge in the evolution of regional income disparities in Europe between 2004 and 2011. The chapter explains 'Descriptive statistics on regional disparities in Europe' looks at some descriptive statistics on regional income disparities across and within countries. Then, the role of specialization, knowledge and socio-economic groups for regional income disparities presents various analyses for the evolution of income disparities in the enlarged Europe, introducing spatial correlation and spatial regression models. It focuses the attention on those countries that, at the beginning of the period under study, were part of the Eurozone. For this group of countries, factors affecting economic convergence may be partly different with respect to those contributing to convergence for the whole European Union. As a consequence, due to lower production costs, integration was accompanied by a delocalization process from the mature economies towards new accession countries.
