Economic and regional development through SNA: the case of the unemployment rate in NUTS 2 regions of the EU

Economic and Regional Development refers to the process of developing regions to improve their economic, political and social prosperity. This document analyses the unemployment rate of the NUTS 2 regions for 2008-2021. A model is proposed, which applies Social Network Analysis (SNA) within the framework of Economic and Regional Analysis. SNA is a process that allows the exploration of social structures using networks and graph theory. It presents the visualization of several networks, created based on the degree of correlation of the total unemployment rate data, and calculates measures and centrality metrics to conclude about the interaction and clustering of regions. The paper shows that by using SNA the interaction between regions and hence their clustering based on the change in the unemployment rate was detected, and it offers their visualization. Therefore, the application of SNA in economic and regional analysis could be a reliable methodology for future research