Extract

As discussed earlier, competitive advantage is throughout Europe predominantly envisioned as a place-based (regional) investment strategy by European, national and regional policy-makers, providing optimal locational circumstances to attract mobile capital, knowledge and footloose firms (Basile et al., 2008). By looking at the actual competition between regions in terms of trade, we add the network dimension to this discussion. This can provide us with suggestions about the network determinacy of regional competitiveness – the main goal of this research project. We applied the regional competitiveness analysis to regional-sectoral high-potential combinations, so-called clusters. Cluster policies are present in practically all countries and regions in the European Union, initiated by either local, national or even European governments (Borras and Tsagdis, 2008). In local clusters, firms specialized in certain products and operating on the same market are located in proximity to each other.