Disparidades en la Eurozona: el debate de la convergencia regional a la luz de las asimetrías en la estructura productiva

The Great Recession shows the large and increasing regional disparities in Europe from the perspective of economic growth. This uneven development is overlapped with significant disparities in terms of productive specialization, which does not seem to be a coincidence. This paper deals with the debate of regional convergence/divergence in the Eurozone, combining both issues. First of all, it analyzes the evolution of economic growth in the regions of the Eurozone in the period 1995-2011, trying to capture various elements that allow understanding better the observed disparities. In this sense, the analysis is complemented by the identification of different growth patterns based on the factorial breakdown into variations of productivity and level of employment. Furthermore, the regional disparities in terms of productive specialization are also introduced in the analysis. The main result supports the existence of a regressive process from the perspective of regional convergence, which is accompanied by large asymmetries in the productive specialization patterns.