The Martin Beckmann RSAI Annual Award for the Best Paper in Papers in Regional Science

Winner 2025

RSAI has the great pleasure to announce that the commission for the 2025 Martin Beckmann award composed by the RSAI Fellows Eduardo Haddad (LARSA), Janet Kohlhase (NARSC), Erik Verhoef, (ERSA) and Rosella Nicolini (EiC of PIRS), has completed the selection of the papers published in Papers in Regional Science (PIRS) in 2024..

The commission selected the following article as the recipient of the 2025 Martin Beckmann award

Giorgio Fazio, Sara Maioli, Nirat Rujimora, "Building back greener, levelling-up or both? An assessment of the economic and environmental efficiency transition of UK regions",
Published in Papers in Regional Science, Volume 103, Issue 6, 2024, 100053, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1056819024000733

Motivation:

This contribution tackles the relevant and open question of the implementation of effective policies to achieve two goals at regional level: “building back greener” and “levelling-up”. The approach implemented by the authors is empirical. The setting of reference is the UK regions for the period 2005-2020 and their study relies on an original data sample. The research strategy exploits the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to calculate the regional and environmental efficiency, whereas the computation of the Markov transition probabilities is meant to quantify the regional transition probabilities to improve at least one the two previous efficiencies. Results emphasize that there is a trade-off between the two types of efficiencies for more than half of the regions and that the costs of transition are unequally distributed. Authors also identify that regions are more likely to become efficient in both directions if they are already environmentally efficient. Furthermore, the empirical analysis does not provide evidence of spatial spillovers for the environmental transition process, but they matter for regional economic efficiency.  The final discussion of this contribution is timely and relevant to inspire effective regional policies. Evidence at hand suggests that there is a clear need of strong coordination between place-based policy and national governments to fully achieve the two selected goals.