Competition is claimed to be beneficial in development projects promoting micro and small enterprise finance although there are still some doubts whether these loans can be developed into a profitable business. Actually nothing is known about how many MSE banking units optimally should be...

We propose a framework for comparing the relationship between poverty and personal characteristics across countries (or across years), and use it to compare levels and patterns of relative poverty in the USA, Great Britain and Germany during the 1990s. The higher aggregate poverty rates in the...

Leaders are critical to a country's success. They can influence domestic policy via specific measures that they enforce, and they can also influence international public opinion towards their country. Foreign Direct Investments are also essential for a country's economic growth. Our hypothesis...

Naval counter-piracy measures off Somalia have failed to change the incentives for pirates, raising calls for land-based approaches that may involve replacing piracy as a source of income. This paper evaluates the effects of piracy on the Somali economy to establish which (domestic) groups...

Naval counter-piracy measures off Somalia have failed to change the incentives for pirates, raising calls for land-based approaches that may involve replacing piracy as a source of income. This paper evaluates the effects of piracy on the Somali economy to establish which (domestic) groups...

Using a micro-level approach to poverty traps, this paper explores welfare dynamics among households in post-war rural Mozambique. Conceptually, the paper builds on an asset-based approach to poverty and tests empirically, with household panel data, for the existence of a poverty trap. Findings...

Trade theory and economic geography suggest that the removal of trade barriers is likely to bring about more economic specialisation and potentially more diverse development paths between countries and regions. Thus, the deepening and extending European integration should be accompanied by an...

This paper has two goals. First, it analyzes the extent to which the innovativeness of spin-offs, either born from a research facility or from another company, is influenced by locational conditions. Second, it provides evidence on how important local cooperation links are in comparison to...

A new approach in German innovation policy organizes contests of proposals for developing innovation networks. Based on an overview of the different programs, we investigate the advantages, problems and limitations of such an approach. We find that this type of policy may have a relatively large...

This study explores the prevalence and nature of the regional divide for the Mexican manufacturing production across sub-national regions. We utilize a unique panel of municipality-level data from the manufacturing sector. An important contribution is the use of different panel methods to...