The interest toward the supposed trade-off between efficiency and equity has strongly come back to the fore within the European Union (EU) after the 2008 economic crisis The worsening of spatial economic imbalances, in fact, opened again the debate whether the European institutions should focus their budget allocations on core areas or on peripheral areas of less developed countries, following concentrated or spatially distributed normative actions This paper addresses the question by applying an original method to assess the relative importance of urban efficiency with respect to spatially distributed resource endowments in affecting regional inequality An innovative two-step procedure is applied: that first estimates a regional production function and then makes use of its output through a simulation to assess efficiency versus spatially even distribution of resources on the improvement of regional cohesion The results show that urban efficiency gains play a relatively minor role in affecting regional disparities if compared with a spatially even distribution of production factors

中文翻译：

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集中增长资产与分散增长资产：集聚经济和区域凝聚力

在 2008 年经济危机之后，对效率与公平之间假定的权衡的兴趣重新成为欧盟（EU）内部的焦点 事实上，空间经济失衡的恶化再次引发了关于欧洲机构是否应该遵循集中或空间分布的规范行动，将预算分配集中在欠发达国家的核心地区或外围地区。 本文通过应用原始方法评估城市效率相对于空间分布资源禀赋对影响的相对重要性来解决这个问题。区域不平等 采用创新的两步程序：首先估算区域生产函数，然后通过模拟利用其产出来评估效率与资源空间均匀分布对提高区域凝聚力的影响 结果表明，如果进行比较，城市效率增益在影响区域差异方面的作用相对较小生产要素空间分布均匀