"This paper focuses on Tohoku University in Sendai in the nonmetropolitan area of Japan. Both a long historical and comparative perspective and a spacial perspective are essential to discuss the relevance of university-local industry linkages to local regional economic development. The...

"This study looks at the contribution of the university system in Vietnam to the socioeconomic development in general, and their relationship with firms, dynamic actors of the economy in particular. The study uses different methods of research, from reliance on secondary data to interviews with...

"The success of the Indian software industry is now internationally recognized. Consequently, scholars, policymakers, and industry officials everywhere generally anticipate the increasing competitiveness of India in high technology activities. Using a structural framework, the author argues that...

Local innovation refers to the dynamics of IK - the knowledge that grows within a social group, incorporating learning from own experience over generations but also knowledge gained from other sources and fully internalized within local ways of thinking and doing. Local innovation is the process...

The primary objective of this report is to provide brief, relevant, and practical tools for World Bank task teams and their country counterparts to facilitate their work in addressing gender issues in transport policies and projects. This responds to the need, expressed by task teams, to...

"Globalization brings opportunities and pressures for domestic firms in emerging markets to innovate and improve their competitive position. Using data on firms in 27 transition economies, the authors test for the effects of globalization through the impact of increased competition and foreign...

"The paper evaluates the effects of privatization in the post-communist economies and China. In post-communist economies privatization to foreign owners results in a rapid improvement in performance of firms, while performance effects of privatization to domestic owners are less impressive and...

"This paper uses firm-level data from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Surveys to study the process of convergence of transition countries with developed market economies. The study focuses on competition and market structure, finance and the structure of lending to firms, and...

"Drawing on the World Bank Investment Climate Assessment surveys, this paper investigates the relationship between firm-level technical efficiency and the investment climate for 22 developing economies and eight manufacturing industries. The authors first propose three measures of firms'...