This section’s aim is to display ongoing Calls for Submission for Special Issues in Journals relevant to the Regional Science Community.
Ongoing Calls
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Posted on 19 November 2024
The following topics are connected to this special issue:
- How does the adoption of digital technologies influence the development of regional
connectivity and economic growth in urban and rural areas? - What are the impacts of widespread digital transition on various forms of mobility, such as
physical transportation, telecommuting, and the distribution of goods and services, across
different regions? - In what ways does digital transition contribute to bridging the urban-rural divide, and how
does it affect economic opportunities and spatial dynamics in rural areas? - How does digitalization influence the creation and sustainability of new business models and
startups in urban areas, particularly within the gig economy? - What are the impacts of digitalization on job markets and traditional industrial landscapes,
and how do these changes affect economic resilience in urban versus rural areas? - How does digital inclusion or exclusion, driven by disparities in digital skills and resources,
impact social inequality and access to services in digitally advanced regions? - How can digital technologies be leveraged to balance the trade-offs between urban
development and environmental sustainability, particularly in the context of real-time
environmental monitoring and sustainable manufacturing practices? - How can policy frameworks be designed to foster inclusive digital transformation, particularly for marginalized communities, while balancing the need for innovation and regulation?
Submission Guidelines
– Manuscripts should be between 5,000 and 7,000 words, excluding references and appendices.
– All submissions will undergo a double-blind peer review process.
– Papers should adhere to the journal’s formatting and citation guidelines.
Important Dates
– Abstract Submission Deadline: 15 March 2025
– Notification of Acceptance: 31 March 2025
– Final Manuscripts Due: 30 November 2025
– Publication Date: August 2026
Editors and Contact Information
For any inquiries or further information about the special issue, please contact the guest editors:
– Dr. Anastasia Panori, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, apanori@plandevel.auth.gr
– Dr. Tasos Kitsos, Aston University, a.kitsos@aston.ac.uk
For more information consult the Call for Papers
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Posted on 19 November 2024
RSPP Call for Papers Special Issue: Public Finance in Regional Development and Sustainability
Guest editor
Soomi Lee – Department of Public Administration, University of La Verne (USA); slee4@laverne.edu
The Regional Science Policy & Practice (RSPP) is pleased to announce a special issue focused on the intersection of public finance and regional science. This issue seeks contributions that bridge academic studies and practical applications to understand the role of public finance in regional development and sustainability.
Regional science and public finance are two fields that, while addressing related issues, often operate in silos. While both fields contribute to our understanding of economic systems, their separation limits an integrated perspective of how public finance shapes regional outcomes and, conversely, how regional characteristics influence the design and impact of fiscal policies.
In this special issue, we aim to break down these silos.
We welcome papers from various disciplines, including public policy, economics, urban planning, geography, public administration, and environmental science. Submissions should employ sound and replicable methods that generate robust evidence. We encourage collaborative contributions between researchers and practitioners to provide actionable recommendations.
We will welcome the following themes, among others:
- Tax policy and spatial development
- Fiscal decentralization and inter- and intra-regional fiscal and socioeconomic disparities
- Intergovernmental transfers and regional economic resilience in Climate-impacted regions
- Financing green transitions in regions
- Fiscal policies and migration, such as workforce mobility and rural depopulation.
- Infrastructure finance and the role of public-private partnerships to finance large-scale projects
- Inter- and intra-comparative regional fiscal policies and best practices in developed and developing countries
We look forward to your contributions that will help shape the future of public finance and regional development policy.
Manuscript submission information:
All submissions must be original and may not be under review elsewhere. All manuscripts will be submitted via the Regional Science Policy & Practice online submission system (https://www.editorialmanager.com/rspp/). Authors should indicate in the cover letter that the paper is submitted for consideration for publication in this special issue “Public Finance in Regional Development and Sustainability”, otherwise, your submission will be handled as a regular manuscript.
- Submissions open until July 31, 2025.
- Compile a Special Issue with at least seven accepted papers: May 2026.
Note:
As an open access journal with no subscription charges, a fee (Article Publishing Charge, APC) is payable by the author or research funder to cover the costs associated with publication. This ensures your article will be immediately and permanently free to access by everyone. The Article Publishing Charge for this journal is EUR 1596, excluding taxes.
The RSPP editorial team are pleased to cover APCs for a selected number of accepted articles that are unable to secure sufficient funding. Authors can indicate whether they wish to be considered for this waiver at the beginning of the submission process or by emailing rspp@regionalscience.org
All submitted papers should address significant issues pertinent to the theme of this issue and fall within the scope of Regional Science Policy & Practice (RSPP). Criteria for acceptance include originality, contribution and scientific merit. All manuscripts must be written in English with high scientific writing standards. Acceptance for publication will be based on referees’ and editors’ recommendations, following a detailed peer review process.
Keywords:
public finance, tax policy, public spending, tax competition, fiscal disparity, fiscal equity, fiscal health, fiscal sustainability, infrastructure funding, green bonds
Why publish in this Special Issue?
- Special Issue articles are published together on ScienceDirect, making it incredibly easy for other researchers to discover your work.
- Special content articles are downloaded on ScienceDirect twice as often within the first 24 months than articles published in regular issues.
- Special content articles attract 20% more citations in the first 24 months than articles published in regular issues.
- All articles in this special issue will be reviewed by no fewer than two independent experts to ensure the quality, originality and novelty of the work published.
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Posted on 5 November 2024
Editor
Katarzyna Kopczewska – University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Science, Poland. Email: kkopczewska@wne.uw.edu.pl
Novelty in research is rooted in critical observation, theory, data or methods. There is no progress in science without these elements. Very often the focus is on the first two, while the last two are neglected. The aim of this special session is to collect papers whose strength lies in data and/or methods. They should open up new avenues for regional research, allowing new questions to be asked and the same phenomena to be seen with new eyes. Taking a new approach is risky – it may not always be successful and convincing to others. But it can also bring great scientific gain and stimulate scientific debate, which is the seed of conferences and publications. This session aims to stimulate discussion on novel methods and data that can be used in regional, urban and spatial studies.
Welcome topics include, among others:
– spatial machine learning
– links between spatial statistics, spatial econometrics and spatial machine learning
– novel approaches to dealing with low granularity spatial data
– methods, tricks and approaches for dealing with spatio-temporal data
– new algorithms for dealing with big data and streaming data
– challenges of aggregating spatial data of different granulation – coherent databases of pixel, raster, line, regional, point, polygon data
– new sources of data that can be used in regional, urban and spatial studies.
– what is right – theory-driven, problem-driven or data-driven science?
Manuscript submission information:
All submissions must be original and may not be under review elsewhere. All manuscripts will be submitted via the Regional Science Policy & Practice online submission system (https://www.editorialmanager.com/rspp/). Authors should indicate in the cover letter that the paper is submitted for consideration for publication in this special issue “A New Toolbox for Novel Research in Regional, Urban and Spatial Studies”, otherwise, your submission will be handled as a regular manuscript.
Submissions open until 15 January 2025.
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Posted on 4 October 2024
Scienze Regionali – Italian Journal of Regional Science Call for Special Issue: Regional Perspectives in Economic Complexity: The Role of Scale in Models and Theories
Guest editors
Calogero, Vieri (Università Milano Bicocca)
Napolitano, Lorenzo (JRC Seville)
O’Clery, Neave (CASA, University College London)
Sbardella, Angelica (CREF Roma)
Tacchella, Andrea (CREF Roma)
The development of Economic Complexity (EC) methods has given new impetus to the study of regional capabilities. This Call aims to stimulate insights from a regional perspective regarding the relationship
between EC tools, different types of capabilities, and their respective scales of operation (geographical,
temporal, organizational, cognitive, etc.). Economic complexity provides methods that latently measure
the extent of local productive capabilities through the spatial distribution of economic activities. In recent
years, a vast literature has emerged that applies EC tools to the study of regional systems and, more
recently, to cities (Balland & Rigby 2017; Gao & Zhou 2018; Balland et al. 2020; Di Clemente et al.
2021), and even to amenities (Juhász et al. 2023) and firms (Laudati et al. 2023; Zhang & Rigby 2022).
Economic complexity offers a potentially powerful paradigm to understand key societal issues and
challenges of our time (Balland et al. 2022), such as the green transition (Mealy and Teytelboym, 2022;
Sbardella et al., 2018; Barbieri et al. 2023), development and technological change (Mewes & Broekel
2022), income inequality (Hartmann et al. 2017; Sbardella et al. 2017; Froy et al. 2022), productivity
polarization (Basile & Cicerone 2022), and also fertility changes (Innocenti et al. 2021).
The study of economic complexity has accelerated in the last decade thanks to two key contributions.
The first involved the introduction of Relatedness metrics (Hidalgo et al. 2007; Tacchella et al. 2023),
which measure the overall affinity between a specific activity and a place, explain path dependency, and
predict which activities will grow or decline in a place (Neffke et al. 2011). The second contribution was
the development of Complexity and Fitness metrics (Hidalgo & Hausmann 2009; Tacchella et al. 2012).
These metrics use data on the geography of activities to estimate the local availability of capabilities,
their diversity and sophistication, and finally to predict future economic dynamics (Cristelli et al. 2015).
Since its introduction, economic complexity has been applied to various dimensions of economic
activities such as product exports, value-added exports, patents, employment, and research articles
(Hidalgo, 2021; Pugliese et al., 2019). Recent efforts seek to combine multiple dimensions, revealing
complementarities between different measures in exploring economic outcomes (Pugliese et al., 2019;
Patelli et al., 2023; Stojkoski et al., 2023) and interdependencies between geographical and technological
scales in the space of innovation (de Cunzo et al., 2023; Pugliese et al., 2019). Given the effectiveness
of complexity measures at the national level, a natural extension is to apply them to the regional and
metropolitan levels, which are the fundamental units of economic geography and the focal points of the
global economy (Jacobs 1969; Storper 1992) and global networks. In fact, economic geography is
strongly scale-based, as there is no basis for assuming that associations existing at one scale will also
exist at another (Stone 1968). The scale perspective is also necessary to reconcile the process of
diversification with that of specialization (Balland et al., 2022). Both theoretically and empirically, the
literature has not yet reached a consensus on how to operationalize EC indicators at different scales. The
relationship between specialization and diversification at different scales and for different types of
capabilities is still relatively unexplored (with some notable exceptions such as Pugliese et al., 2019;
O’Clery & Kinsella, 2022; Sbardella et al., 2017). Moreover, a growing body of literature, such as
Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG), is using the principle of relatedness (PoR) (Hidalgo et al.
2018) to open the black box of the mechanisms that facilitate the transmission of knowledge. This
literature empirically investigates, through various indicators (Tacchella et al. 2023, Schetter et al., 2024),
the importance of different forms of relatedness (Farinha et al. 2018; Jara-Figueroa et al. 2018), their
evolution over time (Diodato et al. 2018), the role of agents of structural change (Neffke et al. 2018;
Elekes et al. 2019; Landman et al. 2023), labor markets (Farinha et al. 2019; Neffke and Henning 2013;
Aufiero et al. 2024), and policy implications (Hidalgo 2023; Balland & Boschma 2022, Li & Neffke
2024; Pugliese and Tacchella 2020).
These tools have also been used to build regional development policy frameworks—such as the European
smart specialization strategy or the Green Deal (Balland et al. 2018; Diodato et al 2023; Pugliese and
Tacchella 2021; Sbardella et al. 2022). The debate on the usefulness of the PoR is very lively (Deegan et
al. 2021; Hassink & Gong 2021; Rigby et al. 2022; Li & Neffke 2022). In particular, on the policy front,
there are still open questions on the “normative” interpretation of related diversification and the potential
risks of low-complexity lock-ins when capitalizing only on existing strengths, as opposed to historical
cases of economic success aimed at diversifying and “complexifying” output through targeted industrial
strategies. This is linked to the call for greater attention to path creation and unrelated diversification, as
well as the factors that promote them (MacKinnon et al. 2019; Coniglio et al. 2021; Boschma et al.,
2023). However, it is key to stress that Economic Complexity analysis provides a snapshot of an
economy’s specialization profile and can offer valuable forecasts into future diversification opportunities
that lead to complexity gains. Still, it does not preclude the role of industrial policy in selecting strategic
development directions.
Specifically, we are interested in papers that address and respond to the following questions:
- What is the role of local and regional economic complexity in relation to different economic and
non-economic outcomes? Are there differences compared to the country-level literature? - What is the relationship between the principle of relatedness and spatial scale across different
domains of knowledge? Are there substantial differences in the mechanisms of knowledge
transmission at different spatial or temporal scales? - How can micro-level information, such as occupations, skills (Turco & Maggioni 2022), and
organizational structure, help us better understand groups, synergies, and skill complementarity
within firms? - At which scales do the processes of diversification and specialization occur? This includes, but
is not limited to, spatial, temporal, and cognitive scales (McNerney et al., 2021). - What are the challenges in building sound EC indicators at different geographical scales with
different underlying patterns of specialization/diversification? - Who are the agents of regional structural change, and what factors promote path creation?
- What factors explain economic complexity, and what is their geography?
- What are the economic mechanisms linking complexity, inequality, and socio-economic
sustainability? - What are the intersections between EC tools and various literatures such as the regional
capabilities framework (and EEG) (Frenken et al., 2023; Kogler et al., 2023), the resource-based
view (RBV) of the firm (Lawson, 1999; Neffke, 2018), the territorial capital approach (Camagni
and Capello, 2012), industrial clusters (Delgado et al., 2014, 2016; Becattini et al., 2014), urban
economics (Ellison & Glaeser, 1997, 1999), Evolutionary economics (Dosi & Nelson 1994) and
complex adaptive systems (CAS) (Batty, 2009; Martin & Sunley, 2007)? - What are the major policy implications from a regional perspective? How do these connect to the
strategies of related and unrelated diversification?
Deadlines:
1.Call for papers: September 2024
2.Deadline submission: February 2025 (working paper) max 6.000 words
3.Selection: March 2025
4.Submission full paper: July 2025
5.Publication of the special Issue: 2026
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Posted on 16 September 2024
This special issue invites full-paper contributions that combine spatial and survey data to present research from a broad range of disciplines, including economics, geography, planning, political science, and sociology. We welcome diverse contributions ranging from empirical findings to theoretical reflections and methodological discussions.
Potential research questions and topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Theoretical insights from socio-spatial data for the advancement of regional science
- Regional disparities and uneven spatial development
- Spatial contexts of social, cultural, and economic action
- Comparative studies using cross-national surveys and country-specific geodata
- Methodological potentials and challenges of linking survey and spatial data
- Development of statistical techniques such as small area estimations or egohoods
- Application of innovative data visualization and mapping techniques
- Challenges and opportunities of georeferencing survey data
- Research data infrastructures and their legal requirements
Submission Procedures
We will consider full-paper submissions of no more than 8,000 words that are submitted until 13 December 2024, through the journal submission system. All papers submitted will be subject to the normal mutually anonymous peer-review process undertaken by the journal.
For further information about the journal and author guidelines, visit https://www.springer.com/journal/10037
Submitted papers must not be under review by any other journal.
For any inquiries, please contact the corresponding guest editor, Daniel Meyer, at +49 355 121004 6802 or at daniel.meyer@bbr.bund.de.
Guest Editors
Julia Binder, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany
Jan Goebel, DIW Berlin – SOEP, Germany
Simon Kühne, Bielefeld University, Germany
Daniel Meyer, BBSR – Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development, Germany (Lead Guest Editor)
Antonia Milbert, BBSR – Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development, Germany
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Posted on 25 June 2024
Geoprogress Special Issue
THE JUST TRANSITION FROM A GEOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE
edited by Maria Giuseppina Lucia (Turin University), Monica Maglio (Salerno University), and Francesca Silvia Rota (Turin University)
Proposals should be sent to info@geoprogress.eu and mariagiuseppina.lucia@unito.it by the following deadlines:
- July 15th, 2024 Abstract in English or Italian (max 2500 characters) with 3 keywords
- July 30th, 2024 Abstracts results announcement.
- October 30th, 2024: Articles (maximum 7200 words or 20 pages)
GeoProgress Journal is an online open-access international peer-reviewed journal of development studies. It is included in the ANVUR list of Class-A journals (ASN 2023-2025) for the 11/B1 sector.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers); they should be well formatted and use correct English (or Spanish or French).
CALL
The public and policy debate on sustainable development frequently refers to the need for a global just transition that is just for people and citizens, companies and sectors, cities and regions. Just transition is considered as a highly attractive promising economic model, part of the new narrative of inclusive growth story (Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, 2018). The complexity of the topic explains the number of specialized studies, the plurality of scientific approaches, the dissimilar conception of justice (Stevis and Felli, 2020), and the varied definitions of just transition that are more and more present in the literature (Stark, 2023). However, what a just transition entails from a geographical perspective is rarely specified (Heffron and Mc Cauley, 2018; Weller, 2019; Heffron, 2021).
Theoretical and empirical works on the following topics are welcome (but not limited to):
- Framing of the just transition concept
- Narrative of territorial justice
- Regional implication of just transition
- Just transition in urban and rural area
- Spatial perspectives of resource sovereignty (food, energy etc.)
- Just transition in production, consumption and distribution processes
- Just transition and territorial resilience
- Governance of just transition
- Environmental and climate justice issues
- Polluting countries vs creditor countries
- Decarbonisation and issues of energy inclusion
- Financing just transition
- Geopolitical features of just transition
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