This paper studies the impact of port activity on regional employment, analysing approximately 560 western European regions, including the largest OECD European ports (116 ports), from 2000-06. The empirical analysis is based on a set of employment equations using the Blundell and Bond (1998)...

By studying the interaction between social capital and decentralization, we show that political decentralization can be a source of divergence across heterogeneous regions. In particular, we claim that since the local endowments of social capital display their effect on the economy mainly...

We investigate the relationship between diversity and productivity in Europe using an original dataset covering the NUTS 3 regions of 12 countries of the EU15 (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, former Western Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United...

The present work investigates the relationship between municipal fragmentation and regional per capita GDP growth rate, using a panel of OECD TL2 regions in the period 1996-2011. According to the fiscal decentralisation literature, fragmentation should enhance growth as local government closer...

Some recent papers by Dell et al. (2009) and Dell et al. (2012) (DJO) relating weather and economic outcomes, have delivered meaningful messages with clear implications to the effects of a changing climate. In a nutshell, the authors claim that a 1°C increase in global average temperatures...

The purpose of this paper is to understand how income inequality is associated with economic growth in OECD regions and whether the degree and type of urban concentration affects this relationship. Both income inequality and urban concentration can be seen as patterns of resource allocation that...

Industrial clusters, which are commonly targeted to receive financial support allocated to locally based development projects, are seen as an effective industrial policy tool for improving productivity and generating employment. Nevertheless, identifying clusters and assessing their economic...

This paper sets out to examine the impact of the quality of local and regional governments on the returns of investment, focusing on the returns of EU structural and cohesion funds. Despite the widespread belief that the quality of government affects the returns of public investments, whether...

This paper benchmarks the performance of OECD rural regions with other types of OECD regions over the period 1995-2010. OECD regions are classified into three types according to the OECD regional typology and into four types according to the extended OECD typology. The latter classifies rural...

This working paper offers an evaluation of the performance of the ports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam, an analysis of the impact of these ports on their territory and an assessment of policies and governance in this field. It examines port performance over the last decades and identifies the...