Two centuries ago the world’s economy stood at the present level of Chad. Two centuries later the world supports more than six-and-half times more people. Starvation worldwide is at an all-time low, and falling. Literacy and life expectancy are at all-time highs, and rising. How did average...

“Commercialization” and “monetization” dance with stage theories from Smith to modern growth theory. The sheer growth of traded or the sheer growth of money, though, do not an Industrial Revolution make. The ill-named “Price Revolution,” for example, came from American gold, not from...

Why did the North-Sea folk suddenly get so rich, get so much cargo? The answers seems not to be that supply was brought into equilibrium with demand---the curves were moving out at breakneck pace. Reallocation is not the key. Language is, with its inherent creativity. The Bourgeois Revaluation...

It is a materialist prejudice common in scholarship from 1890 to 1980 that economic results must have economic causes. But ideas caused the modern world. The point can be made by looking through each of the materialist explanations, from the “original accumulation” favored by early Marxist...

Thrift was not the cause of the Industrial Revolution or its astonishing follow on. For one thing, every human society must practice thrift, and pre-industrial Europe, with its low yield-seed ratios, did so on a big scale. British thrift during the Industrial Revolution, for another, was rather...

The report focuses on the regional system of innovation in małopolskie voivodeship (southern Poland). It presents the results of two empirical stages. The first stage was conducted using computer assisted telephone interviews (CATI) on the sample of 465 enterprises and 51 business support...

The paper elaborates on managerial perception of regional business environment of small and medium-sized enterprises in southern Poland (i.e. two voivodeships: Małopolska and Śląsk). The paper is based on own empirical research, which was conducted in late-2004 year. The research was...

The SME sector is one of the factors that contribute to economic growth in every country on the national and regional level, and it holds true to Poland and Slovakia. Although this sector grew most rapidly during the beginning transition period, it still retains its significant role in the...

Regional environment creates a set of factors that can be called either stimulants or barriers to the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Local governments should remove barriers, transforming them into promoters. An important feature that has to meet both the national...

The aim of the article is the presentation as well as the analysis of the most important directions of the European Union activities in favour of entrepreneurship, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The historical outline of SMEs’ community policy shaping was introduced....