To serve foreign markets, firms can either export or set up a local subsidiary through horizontal Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The conventional proximity-concentration theory suggests that FDI substitutes for trade if distance between countries is large, while exports become more important...

Structural funds are the most intensively used policy instrument by the EuropeanUnion to promote economic growth in its member states and to speed up the process ofconvergence. This paper empirically explores the effectiveness of European Structural Fundsby means of a panel data analysis for 13...

This paper studies the intangible costs of international trade by extending the basic gravity equation with measures of cultural and institutional distance, and institutional quality. Analyzing a sample of bilateral trade flows between 92 countries in 1999, we find that institutional distance...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of decoupling economic growth and energy use and its various determinants by exploring trends in energy- and labour productivity across 10 manufacturing sectors and 14 OECD countries for the period 1970-1997. We explicitly aim to trace back aggregate...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on growth and convergence that has addressed the importance of spatial factors. An important distinction in this literature is the one between absolute and relative location. The literature on absolute location predominantly uses non-spatial...

Economists increasingly pay attention to social capital as an important determinant of macroeconomic growth performance. At the same time, there is discussion regarding the robustness of the results of empirical growth studies. In a seminal paper, Knack and Keefer (1997) assess the effect of...

This paper studies the importance of intangible barriers to trade in explaining variation in disaggregate international trade. The analysis is based on a sample of 55 countries for the year 2000. We explicitly focus on the importance of institutional and cultural dimensions of distance. Our...