The study follows up on the findings of the 7th Cohesion Report of the European Commission which highlighted the development challenges of a group of middle-income EU regions, and the risk for those regions to be caught in the so-called ‘middle-income trap.

The present call for a tender aims at providing robust evidence on the existence of middle income traps across EU regions, on which factors are holding back the development of their economies and on what can low-income regions in the EU do to avoid the middle-income trap in the future.