The reflections which follow build on two interrelated questions, namely, first, whether we are witnessing another "industrial revolution", and second, what is the impact of technological transformations upon the current dynamics of the socio-economic fabric, especially with respect to...

The explosion of the pandemic has been optimistically considered as the ''last straw that breaks the camel's back''. At the time of writing, after three months since its out- burst, we can hardly find any sign of a ''broken camel'': indeed, it could have been the opportunity to collectively...

In this work we discuss the impact of the new ICT techno-economic paradigm upon the vertical and horizontal boundaries of the firm and ask whether the change in the sources of competitive advantage has resulted in changes in the size distribution of firms and also in the degree of concentration...

This work builds upon some long-term secular regularities concerning the relation between consumption of energy, technological progress and economic growth and reassesses the old question raised around forty years ago in the limits to growthʺ discussion (Meadows et al. [1972]), namely are the...

This paper studies the causal relations between regional employment growth in Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) and overall regional employment growth using German labour-market data for the period 1999-2012. Adopting a recently developed technique, we are able to estimate a...

The paper presents a new framework to assess firm level heterogeneity and to study the rate and direction of technical change. Building on the analysis of revealed short-run production functions by Hildenbrand (1981), we propose the (normalized) volume of the zonotope composed by vectors-firms...

This paper examines the determinants of international competitiveness at the level of sectors and firms. First, we address the relation between cost-related and technological competition in a sample of fifteen OECD countries. Results suggest that the countries' sectoral market shares are indeed...

An essential aspect of "catching up" by developing countries is the emulation of technological leaders and the rapid accumulation by individuals and organizations of the knowledge and capabilities needed in order to sustain processes of technical learning. The rates and patterns of development...