On April 14th, 2026, the UC Berkeley Institute of European Studies, along with the Berkeley Dutch Studies Program and the Delegation of Flanders in the USA, welcomed Mark Vancauteren to deliver a lecture entitled “Regional Diversity and Global Economic Integration: Evidence from Belgium,” received by an audience of thirteen attendees. Professor Vancauteren is an Associate Professor in Applied Econometrics at Hasselt University in Belgium and is a Senior Researcher at Statistics Netherlands. Professor Jereon Dewulf of the UC Berkeley Department of German introduced Professor Vancauteren for his lecture.
Using Belgium as a case study, Vancauteren examined how regional diversity can influence the dynamics of globalization. With international connections only becoming more important in an increasingly transnational world, individual regions are adapting in response, accordingly altering who they interact with and in what matter. Citing the use of tariffs by the United States under the Trump administration as an example, Vancauteren highlighted how individual firms adapted around such policy, in many cases decreasing localized presence.
Belgium, who sought to implement the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) to engage in free trade with Canada, saw varied levels of support across differing regions. The north, including Flanders, largely approved, believing it was a necessary step towards multinationalism. In contrast, the South, believing it would negatively impact local farmers, disapproved, providing a key example in a Belgian context of regional issues becoming important in national economic and diplomatic conversations.
Vancauteren centered the middle of the lecture around the concepts of innovation and development. Innovation, which is measured via an index, encompasses contributions including human capital and invention output. Development, similarly categorized via a composite index, is more heavily inclusive of economic factors. Vancauteren argued that globalization should be included within these indexes, serving as a control factor, providing the nuance that innovation on its own may be too specific. Contrastingly, the impact of individuals and firms are more difficult to measure, as you cannot isolate the impact of local factors from economic aspects. Vancauteren highlighted how capital cities, when compared to smaller, more rural regions, are more deeply integrated globally, and are thus more homogenous. He closed the section of the lecture with an anecdote, contending that by the time a shoe arrives at a storefront, it has already traveled the circumference of the Earth six to seven times.
Turning later to theory integration, Vancauteren highlighted regional integration, as the cost of moving goods and services from one place to another has decreased. Given this increased movement, firms are increasingly moving into new markets, affecting both core and periphery locales as the economic activity of the core area has ripple effects onto the latter. Firms engage within the context of a larger network, in which this integration and chain effect multiplies. Regions trade more so with countries and areas that conduct business within their same language, citing the importance of historical ties. Within Belgium specifically, data from National Bank of Belgium (NBB) stressed how the different internal regions of the country – Brussels, Flanders, and Walloon – differed in their approaches and thus in their economic outputs. Flanders, possessing a port, is in turn more globalized and homogeneous with worldwide cities, having received more foreign investment. Brussels possesses a more service-oriented economy, and is the most deeply integrated on the international scale. Flanders, which focuses more prominently on exporting, was the least impacted by globalization. To conclude, Professor Vancauteren left the audience with a final encompassing thought – “global integration matters, but its impact is fundamentally place-based: the same openness generates very different international spillovers depending on regional economic structure.”
Following the conclusion of the lecture, Professor Dewulf opened a question and answer session for the audience to partake in.