Meet Andrea Caragliu, the new Editor-in-Chief of Regional Science Policy and Practice
Andrea Caragliu is Associate Professor of Regional and Urban Economics at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, where he acts as Coordinator of the Ph.D. programme in Architecture, Built Environment, and Construction Engineering. His work focuses on agglomeration economies, macroeconometric regional growth, cross-border regions, and smart urban development.
Assoc. Prof. Caragliu was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Regional Science Policy and Practice, a journal of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI), in January 2025. Previously, he had acted as Executive Director of the RSAI and joined several Horizon/FP, DG Regio, and ESPON projects as partner/principal investigator.
What inspired your interest in Regional and Urban Economics?
As a young graduate in Economics, I started to focus on growth issues – and, as pointed out by Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas in the hyper-cited 1988 JME paper, “The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like [those related to growth] are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.” Later, upon applying for a post-doc position at Politecnico, I discovered a world of colleagues who focused on the spatial breakdown of the economic outcomes that are determined by the rational decision of consumers and firms to locate in a place, due to the net benefits expected from this decision.
As the new Editor-in Chief of Regional Science Policy & Practice, what is your vision for the journal?
Let me take a chance here to highlight the recent Editorial that the new Team (André Chagas, Hee-Jung Jun, Neil Reid, Terciane Sabadini Carvalho, and myself) have just published in issue 1/2025. Now that the journal is gold open access since January 2024, all articles published in RSPP, the Editorial included, are fully accessible to everybody.
The two previous Editorial Boards, in particular the Editors-in-Chief, Michael Carroll and Tomaz Dentinho, did a terrific job. The journal has grown in terms of the number of submissions, average quality of the papers published, and overall impact. Still, there is always room for improvement. Our top priority now is to strengthen the journal’s identity. We want to make RSPP the reference journal of the best papers on regional policies, as well as on the regional impacts of space-blind policies, for all disciplines.
This first goal walks hand in hand with a further effort to raise the bar of the average quality of the papers published in Regional Science Policy & Practice, to better serve the RSAI community and regional science stakeholders globally.
As challenging as these goals may seem, we look forward to your support in making them happen. Please send your best spatial policy papers to RSPP and let us all make it the reference journal in the field of regional and urban policies.
What makes Regional Science Policy & Practice unique?
Regional Science Policy & Practice is among the very few journals explicitly focusing on regional and urban policies. The Editorial Team have been carefully selected to provide authors with a high quality and speedy review process, constructive comments, and the use of an inclusive language. RSPP is open to everyone, and we look forward to receiving high quality papers on regional and urban policies from all backgrounds.
All the above, combined with the global regional science community’s commitment to the discipline, make the Editorial Team believe that authors who decide to submit to RSPP over the next couple of years will benefit from the journal’s ongoing growth – in terms of impact, indexation, and the possibility to influence policy debates.
What are the hot topics in the field right now? Are there any themes on which you are particularly looking forward to receiving submissions?
While the focus on policies may suggest that RSPP occupies a relatively small niche in the scientific landscape, I am convinced that the continuous developments in new policies, as reactions to an ever-changing landscape, will provide countless sources of inspiration for regional scientists. One aspect that is haunting regional scientists, urban economists, and geographers globally is the changing interest in spatial policies. Rising global geopolitical tensions are forcing many countries to increase their budget on defense items, while less funding seems to be available to policies that not only focus on places as a means to offset the negative impacts of space-blind policies, but also target places as triggers of bottom-up development. I would also like to stress that the very concept of space-blind policy is tricky, as it seems to suggest that you may enact policies that exert equal effects all over different regions, while everything we do has a set of potential spatial consequences we should not ignore. So, plenty of food for thought!
Have you got any advice for researchers who wish to publish their paper in Regional Science Policy & Practice?
Think about policy experiments that have a potential spatial breakdown, or of policies that target regions and cities, and use the best empirical methods (be they quantitative or qualitative – and we welcome practice papers, too!) to find counterintuitive results, capable of influencing the policy agenda.
We look forward to receiving your submissions!