This article, a contribution to the ‘proto-industrialisation’ debate, examines the relative advantages of urban and rural locations for cloth manufacturing in later-medieval England and the Low Countries. From the 11th to the mid-14th century, when the English cloth trade began its seemingly...

Commissioned by the European Commission, the Final Report for the EU-Canada Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) on the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) provides a comprehensive assessment of the potential impacts of trade liberalisation under CETA. The analysis...

Offshoring of IT services and back-office services to low-wage countries is a fast-growing market. Besides India, the pacesetter and dominant insourcer, there are numerous other countries and regions attempting to establish themselves as offshoring locations. Our report focuses on nearshoring...

This study documents, though it cannot fully explain, the striking shift in the spectrum of colour patterns in woollen textiles, from those of the Black Death era in the mid to late fourteenth century to those of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century, in the southern Low...

This paper compares the international trade pattern of Portugal with the other three EU15 Cohesion countries - Spain, Greece and Ireland - over the last forty years. The paper adopts a fact-finding approach, investigating the degree of openness of these economies and making extensive use of the...

This paper analyses the relevance and the characteristics of the international fragmentation of production in the Portuguese economy. The empirical trade literature suggests different measures of fragmentation, changing the scope of the concept and using alternative sets of information. The...

The underlying nature of forecast optimization makes the rational expectations hypothesis (REH) a framework that is theoretically consistent with the expectations formation produced by economic agents under well-defined assumptions of unbiased forecasts and efficient utilization of available...

We review the recent performance of the Euro area economy, focusing in detail on the separate roles played by labour input, capital input, and total factor productivity (TFP). After a long period of catching up with US levels of labour productivity, Euro area productivity growth has, since the...

This paper explores the changes in the auto parts sector from the industrial policy perspective of Romania, in the context of globalization. We propose to find the place of the means of transport industry in the processing industry sector and we studied the document of Industrial Policy for...

This paper is an attempt to use the ideas of deepening complexity and self organization theory to a life experiment in developing tourism in a Portuguese mountain region da Estrela.