Roberta Capello is Full Professor of Regional and Urban Economics at Politecnico di Milano. She has been lead partner and partner of different Horizon, DGRegio and ESPON projects. She is President of the European Regional Science Association (ERSA) (2024-2029), Past-president of the Regional Science Association International (2009-2010) and of the Italian section of RSAI (2019-2022). She is Head of the Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering of Politecnico di Milano (2026-2028). She is Past-editor in chief of Papers in Regional Science, founder and editor in chief of the Italian Journal of Regional Science (2020-2020), and of the ERSA flagship journal “Global Challenges and Regional Science”. She is the author of a textbook in Regional Economics, published in English (Routledge, London), Italian (Il Mulino, Bologna) and Chinese (Economy and Management Publishing House, Beijing).
Title of the presentation:
The digital service economy: its geography and impact on wage inequalities
Abstract
The so-called digital service economy is emerging, a multifaceted phenomenon made of a sprawling range of businesses based on digital platforms and redesigning the boundaries of manufacturing towards services. The net socio-economic effects of the digital service economy at the local level are not yet known and difficult to be measured unless the different value creation models it entails are not identified. The presentation deals with such an issue by separating out, on conceptual grounds, specific value creation models within the digital service economy, each presenting distinctive growth opportunities and threats, and, empirically, measuring their spatial diffusion and coexistence in each European region. The taxonomy of European regions obtained serves future research purposes to assess the expected heterogeneous regional socio-economic effects of the digital service economy and its value creation models.
Moreover, the presentation deals with the redistributive consequences of digitalisation, highlighting urbanisation economies as catalysts of wage inequalities. Specifically, the presentation shows that only regions characterized by the most pervasive types of digital service economy experience a rise of intraregional wage inequalities, a result that partly mitigates the automation anxiety frequently dominating the public and, sometimes, the scholarly debates.
Międzynarodowa Konferencja Naukowa
