ESSPIN (HORIZON EUROPE) Economic, Social and Spatial Inequalities in Europe in the Era of Global Mega-Trends
The rapidly changing environment during the first two decades of the new century has been marked by the emergence of new drivers or dynamics that have exercised multiple pressures on welfare and socio-spatial cohesion in Europe and elsewhere and have raised new challenges for policy and collective action. The EU integration processes, the financial crisis, the pandemic, the digitalization of the economy, the unbalanced patterns of globalization, the refugee and migration crisis, and the climate change-related disasters and threats have increased vulnerability of significant social groups and places, triggered discontent and populism and raised new challenges to development and social policy.
The goal of the project is to re-examine the nexus of social, economic, and spatial inequalities in the EU as well as the various typologies, arrangements and mixes of policies to address them in the light of emerging and highly interacting mega-trends and challenges that threaten to increase pressures and make policy choices even more difficult. As new and older drivers of change are projected to create a rather unfavorable environment for balanced growth and socio-spatial resilience, this research will focus on the analysis of policy responses, aiming to make them more pro-active, inclusive, and effective.
The project will detect, model, and map the interdependencies among drivers and outcomes of inequality (including circular causality) in a multi-level, poly-parametric context. It will be structured around inter-related research lines that investigate the combined effects of several drivers, for example, ICT and economic integration, institutional trust and solidarity economy, globalization, the pandemic and social trust, or the economic and climatic crisis on inequalities of various type and at various scales. It will also examine interactions among outcomes to identify path-dependent or cumulative causation processes that may cause multiple types of inequality to coexist and to reinforce each other in different social groups and regions..
The project will examine the impact of drivers of inequality at various spatial scales, from global to local neighborhood and household level focusing on the spatial level that is more suitable for analyzing the drivers of inequalities more clearly. Drivers related to the initial conditions of different places can be affected by market processes, like the ICT-driven industrial revolution while policy responses may gain or lose force, leaving a differentiated net effect on people and places. In general, drivers may originate from any level in the local-global spectrum and impact on inequality at any level. Still, their impact will in many cases be particularly manifested at the smaller scale of households or regions. Households (or, for that matter, individuals) are the basic subjects exposed directly to most of the types and dimensions of inequality, be it opportunities or income, health or race. Understanding the effects of drivers of inequality on households is therefore a necessary precondition for understanding their effects on inequality in many cases. The micro-level analysis will complement the meso-level analysis at the urban or regional level and provide valuable and policy relevant knowledge on the diffusion of inequality at the community, group and household level in different productive, social and institutional environments. The micro-level dimension of inequality will be assessed by cutting across different dimensions with the use of novel spatial microsimulations based on secondary data sources which we consider a major contribution of the project.
Website: https://www.esspinhorizon.eu/
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