Endogenous growth theory has deeply influenced regional growth analyses and inspired regional development policies. Evidence of lack of convergence, club convergence and spatial polarization of per worker income levels has led scholars to question the explanatory power of neoclassical exogenous...

In this article I maintain that until the mid Seventies the regions of the Italian Mezzogiorno have followed a well-known path of divergence and convergence – a pattern in common with many other similar cases. The main characteristic of the Mezzogiorno’s case, however, is that the...

This paper analyses the real effects of financial development subsequent to financial liberalisation in an economy with risk averse savers and learning by lending. Transition from full financial repression to full financial liberalisation might initially slow down the growth process or even...

Since Putnam s work on social capital, the Italian regional case has been a very rich source of both data and theories about the origins of large and persistent differences in local stocks of social capital, and about the impact of such differences on economic performances. The Italian case is...

We describe the competitive environment of microcredit markets globally and we study the effects of competition on loan rates of microfinance institutions (MFIs). We use a new database from rating agencies, covering 379 for-profit and nonprofit MFIs in 67 countries over 2002-2008. First, we find...

The paper analyzes the impact of domestic and international tourism on the economic growth process for 179 European regions. The econometric analysis is based on a spatial growth regression framework where the rate of GDP per capita growth at the regional level for the period 1999-2009 is...

The paper investigates the impact of distance, contiguity and technological proximity on cross- regional knowledge flows, by comparing the evidence concerning co-inventorship, applicant-inventor relationships and citation flows. We find evidence of significant differences across these diverse...

We study the relationship between economic development, geography and “cultural remoteness” (i.e. distance from the technological frontier(s) driving economic development) at a regional level focusing on the role of “insularity”. The analysis covers all island regions worldwide and...

This paper employs individual firm data in order to check the existence of industry-spatial effects alongside other microeconomic determinants of R&D investment. Spatial proximity is defined by a measure of firms’ industry distance based on trade intensity between sectors. The spatial model...

This paper presents a New Economic Geography model of structural change, agglomeration and growth. By assuming the same non-homothetic preference structure as Murata (2008), we obtain similar results in that a progressive reduction of trade costs allows the economy to pass from a...