This paper provides a survey of central issues addressed in research and policy on the economics of water. The paper starts with a discussion of water, its supply and demand, and the institutions that bring supply and demand together. Special attention is paid to the specific features and...

Urban performance currently depends not only on the city’s endowment of hard infrastructure (‘physical capital’), but also, and increasingly so, on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure (‘human and social capital’). The latter form of capital...

Compared to firms in rural regions, firms in urban agglomerations of the Netherlands dedicate a higher share of their R&D to product development. In our Hurdle Count Data estimate of determinants of new product announcements we find that, with a given product-R&D-intensity, firms in central...

The paper takes for granted that urban areas - and hence the built environ­ment - may play a catalytic role for effective environmental policy. This position is based on the fact that most residential, production and transportation activities in the developed world take place in urban areas. A...

The present study addresses the relevance of geographic proximity for companies in our age of advanced ICT. Many visions of, and speculations on, an increased footlooseness of companies and a concomitant dispersal of urban economic activity have been published in recent years. To identify...

This paper regards locational choice as an entrepreneurial act and seeks to identify the drivers of locational choice of SME finns. Based on a recent database on Dutch entrepreneurs, factoranalytic methods are deployed to trace three clusters of driving forces.

This paper addresses the local-regional-supra-regional orientation of small-scale farms and firms in rural areas. Due attention is given to the role of local centres (villages, towns) for the functioning of rural areas. With help of a quantified indicator spatial linkages related to sales and...