This report synthesises the regional development and innovation challenges facing Romania’s RDAs and potential activities to overcome these in three areas – strategic planning and performance measurement, finance and implementation, and communication and stakeholder engagement.

This report assesses the extent to which Croatia’s multi-level governance system is supporting its regional development objectives. In particular, it provides an overview of the country’s regional development performance on several demographic, economic and well-being indicators. From there, it considers how the regional development reforms adopted since 2014 affect the ability of national and subnational governments to design, implement, fund, monitor and evaluate place-based regional development plans.

This report presents the findings and recommendations of the OECD review of SME and Entrepreneurship Policy in the Slovak Republic. It examines how to address the challenges of stimulating more productive entrepreneurship, supporting enterprise scale-up, stimulating SME exports and global value chain participation, increasing SME innovation and innovative entrepreneurship, and making entrepreneurship more inclusive across the population.

With regions and nations having formally fulfilled the ex ante conditionality, this book provides a first overall review of RIS3 policy processes, aiming to assess the consistency of the concept of smart specialization from an applied, policy-oriented perspective. Moving from the theory of design to the practice of implementation, the reflections and case studies in this volume reveal strengths and weaknesses in the way concrete strategies have been conceived and implemented, enabling reflections on the future of the concept in a more general sense. In many cases, smart specialization strategies turn out to be new variants of regional development policies, embracing the importance of a place-based approach. However, the approach’s potential to add distinctive value will stem from its capacity to turn innovation and knowledge into tools for local development by harnessing them for wider territorial development goals. By helping regions to identify and leverage untapped resources through new processes, smart specialization-based policies may help to reconcile cohesion and competitiveness objective. Consequently, new approaches appear most promising where institutional, administrative and political conditions allow the setup of genuinely new processes and where their focus is on territorial assets in a comprehensive manner rather than mere industrial renewal. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Planning Studies.

- Foreword and acknowledgements - Executive summary - Spatial and land-use planning systems across the OECD - Australia - Austria - Belgium - Canada - Chile - Czech Republic - Denmark - Estonia - Finland - France - Germany - Greece - Hungary - Ireland - Israel - Italy - Japan - Korea - Mexico - Netherlands - New Zealand - Norway - Poland - Portugal - Slovak Republic - Slovenia - Spain - Sweden - Switzerland - Turkey - United Kingdom - United States - Bibliography

This volume seeks to bring together the experiences of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) throughout Europe to provide material for a comparative study of regional planning accross the continent. Using an analytical framework developed by the editors, the contributors evaluate the long term potential and limitations of the RDAs in terms or promoting regional economic development. Institutional and other preconditions for successful regional policies are identified, and combined with a broad analytical and geographical coverage that includes Eastern Europe, a clearer picture of the relevance of the RDAs emerges.

Land use has important consequences for the environment, public health, economic productivity, inequality and social segregation. Land use policies are often complex and require co-ordination across all levels of government as well as across policy sectors. Not surprisingly, land use decisions ...