Regional Competitiveness: A Structural-Based Topic Analysis on Recent Literature

The concept of Regional Competitiveness (RC), in the last years, had a considerable influence on the development of strategies and policies focused on sub-national areas from an economic and social perspective. In particular, RC attracted the substantial attention of policymakers due to the possibility of evaluating and comparing different territories without any established political or conceptual framework. Conversely, scholars have long debated the meaningfulness of territorial competitiveness itself and, in case, which dimensions have to be included. This study reviewed the most recent scientific literature concerning RC with a bibliometric approach based on topic modelling. The use of a textual-based statistical approach offered an interesting insight into the RC research domain. We highlighted the topics discussed by scholars, showing the patterns emerging across years and from different publication types, and marked the differences between the vocabulary used by authors coming from EU and non-EU countries. Finally, a comparison between the RC issues coming from the literature analysis with the RC issues defined by policymakers tried to link the two standpoints followed by the institutions and the academia in a more comprehensive conceptual framework.