This is the fifth volume of The NEBI Yearbook, whose aim it is to provide a balanced picture of integration in the North European and Baltic Sea areas. The special focus of NEBI 2003 is to survey the lessons learned and the experience gained as a result of a decade of intensive pan-Baltic and Barents co-operation made possible as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like the previous volumes, NEBI 2003 contains a unique Statistical Section covering the entire NEBI area.

Bjllrn Tore Godal Norwegian Ambassador to Germany Chairman of the Editorial Advisory Board Several of the contributions to the present volume of The NEBI Yearbook have been inspired by the fact that roughly speaking, ten years have passed since the first steps were taken to initiate cross-border co-operation in the Barents and Baltic Sea areas. One of the most important co-operative organisations in the European Northeast, i. e. The Council of the Baltic Sea States, was launched in 1992. The Barents Euro Arctic Council was established in 1993. An avalanche of co-operative and cross-border initiatives has since hit this part of Europe with all kinds of actors participating - states, regional and municipal authorities, univer sities, national organisations, businesses and private interests. Even international organisations and actors from outside the immediate NEBI area have taken a special interest in this dynamic part of the world. Among the most important is the European Union, whose Finnish-inspired Northern Dimension initiative has become a permanent fixture. As many of the chapters in NEBI 2003 testifY, integration in the NEB I area - across old political and ideological borders and cultural and socio-economic divides that are among the most pronounced anywhere in the world - has on the whole been a great success."

This Festschrift is dedicated to ROLF FUNCK on occasion of his 60th birthday on February 7, 1990. It was a wholehearted desire of the authors who all are obliged to ROLF FUNCK in their research work to please and to honour him and to express their deep gratitude. I gladly took the initiative of preparing this Festschrift since I have been closely associated with ROLF FUNCK for many years of his academic life. We first met in 1958 when he was Assistant Professor (Wissenschaftlicher Assistent) and I was student at the University of Munster. A few years later, when ROLF FUNCK, still very young, moved to the University of Karlsruhe as Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute of Economic Policy and Research, he offered me the opportunity of working with him and this started a long period of successful scientific collaboration. Nowadays we meet only occasionally at conferences, in committees etc. , but I always recall with pleasure the warm-hearted and stimulating atmosphere he created at his In stitute in Karlsruhe. I express my thanks to the authors and to the publisher, the Springer Verlag, for their cooperation as well as to the sponsors who provided the necessary funds for the publication of this Festschrift. For her enthusiasm in compiling and processing the articles on the PC and producing the final draft I am indebted to Mrs. Ilona Lohr.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Institute for Regional Research (Institut for Regionalforschung) was celebrated by an international conference on "Regional Growth and Regional Policy within the Framework of European Integration". We are happy to be able to present the outcome of that conference in this volume. Its authors reflect the Institute's international character. Their contributions char- acterize main fields of interest of the Institute's research staff. The Institute for Regional Research is an establishment of the Economic and So- cial Science Faculty (Wirtschafts-und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultiit) at Chris- tian-Albrechts-University in Kiel, one of the faculty's four institutes of economics. It began as an initiative of Reimut 10chimsen. He wanted to upgrade regional re- search and planning at the university because at the faculty level this field was only a minor province. As further justification for the foundation of an institute, 10chimsen referred to the growing international and national significance of re- gional research and especially of regional structural policy. The need for an auto- nomous institute in the north of Germany was emphasized above all, particularly since regional science in the Federal Republic of Germany in the late sixties was largely limited to the universities in Freiburg, Karlsruhe and MOnster.