Between 1981 and 2001 Italy became a services-oriented economy. The loss of jobs in manufacturing was less pronounced in Italy’s organized industrial districts than in the rest of the country. The branches of manufacturing that typify the districts outperformed the others in terms of...

The paper proposes a new way of analysing the efficiency of dynamic market selection, based on the persistence of scale economies. The persistence of scale-related inefficiencies is used as an indicator for the effectiveness of market selection. We use a DEA method to construct the productivity...

The paper investigates whether scale effects, market structure, and regulation determine the poor productivity performance of the European business services industry. We apply parametric and nonparametric methods to estimate the productivity frontier and subsequently explain the distance of...

A pervasive trend that characterised the past two decades of European economic growth is that the share in the economy of commercial services, and particularly business services, grows monotonically, and this mainly to the expense of the manufacturing sector. The structural shift reflects a...

Using data from 11 EU countries, the paper investigates the impact of scale economies on labour productivity in European business services. Moreover, it analyses whether the incidence of scale sub-optimality is related to characteristics of the market or to national regulation characteristics....

The sector business services contributes directly and indirectly to aggregate economic growth in Europe. The direct contribution comes from the sector’s own dynamism. Though the business-services industry appears to be characterised by strong cyclical volatility, there was also a strong...

This study contributes to the understanding of the effects of FDI by illustrating that social networks affect technological learning in the Costa Rican ICT cluster in ways that the literature on technological capabilities failed to capture. It is based on extensive qualitative evidence collected...

The paper looks at the trends of India's high Technology trade vis-a-vis other countries

This paper analyzes the role of innovation activities in the export participation of Chinese high-tech firms during the period of 2005-2007. Using a parametric, instrumental variable approach and a non-parametric matching method, we find that firm-level innovation efforts, measured by R&D and...

This paper examines complementarities and potentialities in merchandise trade in general and high technology trade in particular between India and Russia. In this context, we have also looked at the complementarities for bilateral transfer of investment, technology and skills. The analysis shows...