Productive structure and spatial inequalities. The role of innovative clusters.

This paper focuses on the interactions among socio-economic inequalities and the spaces they concern, investigating the connections between economic production, social capital and inequality in a region. Main research questions are about the spatial relations between the demand side of labour market and multidimensional inequality, especially looking at the role of innovative clusters. The production structure and social capital endowments of 205 selected EU15 regions have been reviewed for the time range 2000-2011. Available data have been synthesised by explorative Principal Component Analysis. Extracted indicators for the two selected economic and social dimensions have been compared to the levels of the estimated multidimensional measure of inequality in the regions. Results say that spatial distributions of considered domains share similar patterns, opposing north to south of Europe.