In this article, I renew the "dispute over methods" (Methodenstreit) taking into account contemporary achievements of the philosophy of science. The current dominant understanding of what is "scientific" in economics is derived from the classical natural science. Economists ignore the fact that...

This paper aims to contribute to existing knowledge related to the worker cooperative (CTA) creation process by studying the factors that influence the process using an inductive-deductive method: the Grounded Theory. For this reason, a total of 37 in-depth interviews have been carried out with...

This paper constitutes the first chapter in my work-in-progress manuscript, Microeconomic Theory: A Heterodox Approach. Because many heterodox feel that the only micro theory is mainstream micro, the paper starts with a brief rejection of mainstream theory. It then proceeds to give an overview...

This paper proposes an approach to theory creation and evaluation for heterodox economics that is based in the integration of critical realism and the method of grounded theory. Critical realism provides the concepts of structures and causal mechanisms that form the outline of theory...

Between 1981 and 2001 Italy became a services-oriented economy. The loss of jobs in manufacturing was less pronounced in Italy’s organized industrial districts than in the rest of the country. The branches of manufacturing that typify the districts outperformed the others in terms of...

The paper proposes a new way of analysing the efficiency of dynamic market selection, based on the persistence of scale economies. The persistence of scale-related inefficiencies is used as an indicator for the effectiveness of market selection. We use a DEA method to construct the productivity...

The paper investigates whether scale effects, market structure, and regulation determine the poor productivity performance of the European business services industry. We apply parametric and nonparametric methods to estimate the productivity frontier and subsequently explain the distance of...

A pervasive trend that characterised the past two decades of European economic growth is that the share in the economy of commercial services, and particularly business services, grows monotonically, and this mainly to the expense of the manufacturing sector. The structural shift reflects a...

Using data from 11 EU countries, the paper investigates the impact of scale economies on labour productivity in European business services. Moreover, it analyses whether the incidence of scale sub-optimality is related to characteristics of the market or to national regulation characteristics....

The sector business services contributes directly and indirectly to aggregate economic growth in Europe. The direct contribution comes from the sector’s own dynamism. Though the business-services industry appears to be characterised by strong cyclical volatility, there was also a strong...