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...

Unemployment rates appear to vary widely at the subregional (e.g. local or provincial) level. Using spatial econometric models for spatial autocorrelation, this paper focuses attention on the spatial structure of regional unemployment disparities of Italian provinces. On the basis of findings...

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...

This paper aims to present a new analysis framework for assessing disparities among regions (or countries). It combines both economic and social variables, where the economic attributes refer in particular to marked differences in consumption variables. This analysis is also appealing for...

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 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 investigates patterns of manufacturing location in the context of increased economie integration in Central and East European countries. Using regional data for the period 1990-1999, we identify and compare patterns and determinants of manufacturing location in five European Union...

In this study we address the potential rise of innovative regions in Central and Eastern Europe by connecting the interests of foreign investors and the interests of recipient regions as learning regions. Our exploratory results give a rather pessimistic picture in that enhancing the innovative...

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.