Modelling Regional Growth: an Advanced MASST Model

This paper presents a new version of a forecasting regional growth model called MASST (MAcroeconomic, Sectoral, Social, Territorial model). This new version is specifically designed to take account of sectoral and social (intangible) effects on the growth of regions, and it is therefore able to produce scenarios for all European regions according to differentiated industrial specializations and future industrial patterns of growth. The value added of this version of the model is threefold: (i) its capacity to show scenario results based on industrial resource reallocation; (ii) to measure the impacts of scenario assumptions on manufacturing and service employment separately; and (iii) its capacity to take intangible elements (like social capital) into account in regional macro-econometric growth models.