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...

One of the sectors that gained most of the boost in ICT developments is the call centres sector. The focus in this paper is on spatial diffusion patterns of call centres in the Netherlands. The number of call centres has increased rapidly in the last decade and it seems that impacts of call...

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...

Immigration and multiculturalism are at the heart of modern western societies. The issue of language acquisition of immigrants is intrinsically linked to immigration. We formally link language acquisition of immigrants to the relative size of the immigrant stock, employing a microeconomic...

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...