Integración, especialización y concentración: las regiones europeas de la zona euro

The European Monetary Union (EMU, will influence the interregional division of labour and will affect the susceptibility of regions to asymmetric shocks, and the core-periphery divide of regional incomes. Centralto this subject is the question of how the industrialspecialisation of regions changes in the process of integration. According to considerations provided by the New Economic Geography (NEG) one could expect the specialisation of regions to increase via a dispersion of industries with scale economies mitigating the core-periphery divide. However, NEG also allows for quite reverse solutions, according to circumstances. The existing empirical evidence for European countries and regions as yet yields that any change of specialisation is slow and that the direction toward increase or decrease is equivocal.