TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT AND REGIONAL COHESION IN THE LESS FAVOURED REGIONS: THE CASE OF CASTILLA

One of the main objectives in the European Union is to improve the economic and social cohesion among its territories. In this context, a major focus is placed on the less favoured regions. Among the multiple instruments which can be implemented to attain the previous objective, those aimed to finance Research and Technological Development projects (RTD) in these regions are becoming more and more relevant. Such particular policy is founded on the idea that regional competitiveness, and therefore, each region's ability to enjoy a sustainable and sustained growth, relies primarily on the RTD efforts which can be undertaken by the different regional economic actors. Several European Union reports confirm that inter-regional disparities in technological development, the so-called ‘RTD gap’, are still much wider than the regional differences in economic and social terms, the so-called ‘cohesion gap’. That fact stresses the need for regional policy to increasingly concentrate its efforts on the promotion of technological innovation in the productive systems of less developed areas. In this paper, we will focus on the relationships between the RTD efforts carried out in the less favoured regions, within the framework of multiple level of government economic policies, and the achievements in the realm of regional cohesion. In order to do so, first, we will try to observe the evolution of inter-regiona