Territorial context in the research on the EU cohesion. One-speed or multi-speed Europe?

Abstract

A picture of European economy is differential. There is no doubt one could really identify one simple reason of this. There are for sure not only size of the country, number of its inhabitants, stage of development or geopolitical location separately, that can decide about it. This is rather a combination of these and many other (later discussed) elements responsible for this. In this context it should be noted that for such a wide variety of structures, a “one-size-fits-all” strategy of building European competitiveness cannot be implemented. That is why an author shares an increasingly common thesis that there is no one-speed Europe and the real value of the “European” is not determined by its uniformity, but the variety of territorialities. Bearing this in mind, one must state that what can really decide about the power of the European Union, it is a variability of institutional contexts of regional development. The aim of this paper is to overview an compile the increasingly popular discussion among regional economists (with the usage of institutional economics framework), to what extent the demand for diversity of research methods in regional science (e.g. triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods), can be reconciled with methodological regime and the need to ensure the comparability of results.