Over a decade on from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the European economy has largely recovered.

But many local economies throughout Europe are in a state of prolonged stagnation, rendering them an ideal hunting ground for populists, according to a report from ING senior economists Bert Colijn and Joanna Konings.

Employment levels within the European Union are now 2% above where they were in 2008, but some regions have not seen this recovery, and have yet to show signs of bottoming out. Even within nations which have apparently recovered, there are pockets of regional weakness.

While Germany has shown strong employment growth, regions such as Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia have been in steady decline for the past decade. In Italy, the northern regions and the area surrounding Rome present a picture of recovery, but job creation in the south has been dire.

The scars of the crisis are still impacting regional labor markets, with structural disparity driven in part by the region's digital infrastructure, education, innovation and vulnerability to globalization.

The impact is evident in regions which maintain a higher-than-natural unemployment rate, and growth in these areas is influenced by a number of structural factors outside of the business cycle, the ING report found. In particular, digital infrastructure and research and development (R&D) investment offer important foundations for growth.

Areas with the highest percentage of broadband access saw stronger employment growth over the decade and became regional centers of economic activity, with large parts of Bulgaria, Romania, Portugal and Italy lagging behind and remaining in gradual decline. Investment in digital infrastructure was directly proportionate to economic recovery.

Similarly, investment in research and development (R&D) is strongly correlated to employment growth over the past decade, suggesting that regions which are "knowledge hubs" create jobs at a faster pace than those which are not. Cities with 1,000 euro ($1,118) or more R&D spend per capita form a roughly diagonal belt from Liverpool to Vienna, along with several Nordic regions.