During the past four years, the countries of the European periphery - the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) - have been experiencing an economic-financial crisis that can only be compared to the Great Depression. To solve the crisis, the EU and the IMF instituted...

Unlike most enthusiastic narratives of various success stories in recent North European regional economic development led by innovation, localized learning, social capital and institutional embeddedness, this paper deals with a set of major stresses and problems of local economic development in...

There is a huge literature regarding the main determinants and sources of economic growth. Most of the recent work emphasizes on the role of knowledge, and innovation activities typically produced by a specific sector of the economy, and furthermore in the role of entrepreneurship and analysing...

Social economy , the ground between free market private benefit institutions , the State regulation and society , needs to be positively identified. The existing , traditional , monitoring and evaluation concepts , methods and tools are prooven to ineffectively identify and describe the social...

Technological change and innovation activities contribute essentially to the regional dimension and productivity growth. The technological infrastructure and innovation capabilities affect not only the regional growth, but also the whole periphery and economy as well. In the last decades, OECD...

The importance of diffusion of technology for economic growth has been emphasised by economic literature. Much of the recent work on economic growth can be viewed as refining the basic economic insights of classical economists. The recent debate on the determinants of output growth has...