There are three parts of our paper. Firstly, it gives an overview about the goals and factors which affect the integration of local communal services. Horizontal integration means joining the various individual service providers, such as water supply and sewage, communal waste, district heating,...

This paper illustrates the story of the Port of Gioia Tauro, a major infrastructure investment co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund in the period 1994-1998, but whose origin dates back to the beginning of the 1970s. It draws from a recent ex-post evaluation carried out for the...

This article examines the determinants of traffic volumes and the revenues per tonne generated by Spain?s port authorities. The interest of the study lies on the strong differences between port authorities in a context of strict regulation but that provides some scope for price competition. We...

We analyse the impacts that infrastructure provision has on long run urban development. The topic is of major importance to policy-makers when deciding whether or not to invest in major infrastructure projects. The analysis helps policy-makers to understand the intended, and potentially...

Although it has frequently been argued that the quality of institutions affects the innovative potential of a territory, the link between institutions and innovation remains a black box. This paper aims to shed light on how institutions shape innovative capacity, by focusing on how regional...

The regional imbalance is one of the major hindrances for sustainability of economic growth of Indian economy. The persistence of imbalanced regional growth poses a serious threat to the economic growth and development, and creates economic, social and political tension among the states in...

We measure technical efficiency in R&D of Italian regions with the aim of understanding whether the variation in transport infrastructure endowment across regions might be the cause of efficiency disparities. We use a semi-parametric method where in the first step we estimate bootstrapped...

The purpose of this research is the post-opening evaluation of "Attiki Odos Motorway" (AOM) socio-economic impacts, during the period of its operation. The AOM is the peripheral ring-road of the metropolitan Athens-Attica area. To this end, the study estimates an ex post project¢s "Overall...

We investigate how variety affects the innovation output of a region. Borrowing arguments from theories of recombinant innovation, we expect that related variety will enhance innovation as related technologies are more easily recombined into a new technology. However, we also expect that...

The paper deals with the problematic addressed in the above subtitle; i.e. that ?smart specialization? indicates old wine (specialization) in new bottles (smart), but is in fact new wine (diversity) in old bottles (specialization). This confusion will obviously lead to problems with respect to...