The book is aimed at a wide audience, including academics, economic geography, spatial planning and regional policy researchers, institutional leaders and managers, national and institutional policy makers, practitioners, administrators, master's and senior bachelor's students on related courses, general readers. A list of courses and corresponding programmes in Geography, Planning, Economics and Management will be prepared later.

Seeks to present a new concept of regional upgrading in lagging regions and to detect a critical link between regional disparities and human capital Unique in its focus on economic geography and regional development patterns in Southern Europe Combines profound theoretical discussion with strong empirical and comparative content Offers great diversity of the scientific (and regional) background of contributors Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext
is Associate Professor of Regional Economics at Politecnico di Milano since December 2010. He is Editor of main section papers and Book Review Editor of Regional Studies since 2013. Previously, he was member of the editorial board of the Italian Journal of Regional Science. He was member of the Council of the Italian Section of the Regional Science Association International (AISRe) for the period 2010-2016 and was its Treasurer for the period 2010-2013. He has been involved with various roles in a large number of research project, especially at European level, financed by the Espon programme, the FP5, FP7, Horizon 2020 or the European Commission directly. He is co-author of several books and author of a large number of papers published in refereed journals in the field of regional economics, primarily on the themes of regional growth and development, the models for forecasting regional growth, regional policy, the theory and measurement of regional disparities, the territorial aspects of human capital and innovation.

Inhalt
Introduction.- Part I: Regional Upgrading in Southern Europe: General Framework.- Part II: Policies and Regional Upgrading in Southern European Regions.- Part III: Within the Box of Regional Upgrading: Economic Base, Regional Upgrading, Human Capital, Over Education Migration, Labour Market, FDI.- Part IV: Out of the Box Discussion: Theories and Empirical Evidence.- Part V: Postcript.