Regional, industry, innovative and knowledge-based clusters have become popular and important policy tools to boost economic development and competitiveness at regional level. The expectations of their role is still growing as it can be seen in the statements of official documents of European...

Five years ago the first theoretical works on industry clusters in regional development appeared in the Czech academic papers and conference proceedings. The research in this field, which was initiated at the Faculty of Economics at VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, was followed by other...

China’s Western Development Strategy (WDS) has been carried out since 1999 with remarkable achievements, whereby Western China also experienced a rapid and stable development during the past decade. This paper analyzes policy actions and effects of WDS. The findings indicate that Western...

The paper undertakes a detailed examination of the special economic zone programme in Poland in the field of regional and industrial policy. The programme was implemented in 1995-1997 and nowadays in Poland operate 14 special economic zones established in the purpose of acceleration economic...

This study proposes a comparative analysis at regional level, of concentration level of expenditure co-financed by the Structural Funds in the programming period 2007/13. For main types of expenditure, we evaluate by the concentration index of Herfindahl-Hirschman the level of concentration of...

The economic and financial crisis has brought firms, territories and countries before a set of restrictions to a greater or lesser extent, function as the conditioners of economic activity for several agents, also affecting their activities associated with the development of its innovation...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we analyze the Inter-territorial Compensation Fund (ICF) as a regional policy instrument contemplated in the 1978 Spanish Constitution. Attention is focused on the period 1990-2013. Both the drivers of the ICF and its impact on regional public investment...

During the past two decades, the “Washington Consensus” has been the dominant recipe for unleashing economic growth in developing countries. In view of the strong criticism mounted against it, it seems to have lost prominence recently. The success of the East Asian newly industrialized...

Throughout the second half of the 20th Century, urbanization, new technologies, rapid labor-saving productivity growth in primary industries, and improved highways combined to create large-scale rural-urban functionally integrated regions. These forces have raised the stakes for regions in their...

In this paper we shed lights on the economic growth of Mezzogiorno of Italy during the last twenty years. The empirical analyses refer to various aspects of the Mezzogiorno economy: income per capita, labor productivity, public and private accumulation and competitiveness. The main contribution...