Modeling structural change in the European metropolitan areas during the process of economic integration
Résumé
The specialization patterns ofmetropolitan areas are crucial in characterizing the effects of economic integration
in Europe. This paper aims to provide and estimate an econometricmodel that explains both sectoral specialization
and sectoral dissimilarity,measuredwith the GINI and the KRUGMAN indexes, respectively, for 35 European
metro areas during the period 1980–2005. A semiparametric approach is proposed to address the issues of nonlinearity
and separability. The econometric analysis indicates how the deepening of the processes of development
and integration occurred in the last decades affected both specialization and similarity of the sectoral metropolitan
structure, finally supporting a “specializing alike hypothesis”