This research project, entitled Smart Cities: Does Urban Technology and Innovation Increase Citizens’ Wellbeing and Create Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy? is an extension of the HARRIET project.

The goal of the proposed project is twofold:

• To explore the determinants of urban competitive advantage in the global economy at the cities’ level with particular emphasis on factors related to technology and innovation
• To study how these determinants affect citizens’ wellbeing with the aim to understand the link between wellbeing and competitive advantage

Within the frame of this goal, the researchers aim to answer the following questions:

1. Is there a link between economic competitive advantage,citizens’ wellbeing, and the availability of “smart” infrastructure in urban areas? What are the main determinants ensuring this link? Does availability of urban technology make cities better off and people happier?
2. Does the relation between economic competitive advantage,citizens’ wellbeing, and the availability of smart city infrastructure depend on cities’ “hard” characteristics such as geographical location and population size?
3. Are cities’ political and socio‐economic characteristics and citizens’ wellbeing correlated?
4. What are the implications of (1), (2), and(3) on the welfare state?

Expected Outputs

The project will result in two working papers, aimed for publication in general purpose Economics journals as well as interdisciplinary journals. Furthermore, all data collected during the lifetime of this project will be made publicly available, except the initial proprietary dataset from The Economist, whose licence only allows its use for research purposes. The output of this project will be presented at Economics conferences as well as conferences on Smart Cities, and will also be disseminated to the general public via the HARRIET Smart Cities’ blog http://hubofallthings.com/Harriet/ as well as via http://www.voxeu.org.

Research Team

Ganna Pogrebna

Funding