It is generally acknowledged that employment in our economies is increasingly dependent on services. European countries are continuing their gradual move towards a service-based economy with today nearly 70% of the total labour force being employed in service activities. It is also generally...

We use a new data set for European manufacturing firms to assess whether a short term technological convergence process has been taking place among manufacturing firms in seven European countries. The empirical analysis aims to study the effects of international co-operative R&D on short term...

Why do Scandinavian countries perform better in terms of environmental protection than other European Union countries? In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that societies characterised by low-income inequality (such as the Nordic European countries) generate political-economic equilibria...

This study explores the link between environmental degradation, economic growth and income inequality within the framework of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) literature. To investigate this issue, we examine how inequality affects carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their relationship with...

In this paper, we assume that redistribution modifies the community structure of an economy and generates both intra and intergenerational mobility. In a world in which neighbourhood attributes and family backgrounds are important to determine the investment effort and the productivity of...

The number of studies seeking to empirically characterize the reduced-form relationship between a country economic growth and the quantity of pollutants produced in the process has recently increased significantly. In several cases researchers have found evidence pointing to an inverted-U...

We examine empirically the effect of natural resource abundance on economic growth. We find that natural resources have a negative impact on growth when considered in isolation, but a positive impact on growth when including in the analysis other variables such as corruption, investments,...

Although developing countries face a drastic increase in their greenhouse gas emissions, mitigation actions against climate change do not rank high among their priorities. The obvious reason lies in the necessity for them to continue the development process, which is characterised by pressing...

The relationship between economic growth and pollution is very complex, depending upon a host of different factors. Thus the study of this phenomenon represents a challenging endeavor. While most economics papers begin with theory and support that theory with econometric evidence, the literature...

Specializing in tourism is an option available to a number of less developed countries and regions. But is it a good option? To answer this question, we have compared the relative growth performance of 14 "tourism countries" within a sample of 143 countries, observed during the period 1980-95....