The importance of metropolitan regions as national growth and development engines, and in particular as driving forces in national as well as global innovation processes is well recognized. This paper highlights the role of metropolitan regions in different contexts in order to lay a foundation...

Past research on the effects of agglomeration externalities on regional economic development is inconclusive and has focused mainly on employment growth and innovative output. This paper considers the link between agglomeration externalities and entrepreneurship. It does so by looking at the...

The relationship between start-up rates and regional economic development has been studied rather extensively in recent years. Dynamics in start-up rates have however received considerably less attention. In this paper we analyze the persistence of start-up rates across Swedish regions over a...

The link between proximity and innovation has been dwelled upon extensively in the literature. A regional economic milieu characterized by proximity between relevant actors is maintained to be suitable for establishing and maintaining successful regional innovation system. In this paper it is...

Continuous product and process innovations are prerequisites for sustainable competitiveness of both nations and regions. How such innovations are created and how successful innovation processes can be initiated are therefore extremely important questions. In recent years, it has been recognized...

The main purpose of the study in this paper is to establish to what extent accessibility to R&D and human capital can explain regional export. This is done by estimating knowledge production functions, with export value and high valued exports in Swedish municipalities from 1997 to 1999 as...

New knowledge generated by an economic agent in a region will tend over time to flow to other economic agents in the same region but also to economic agents in other regions. It is quite common in the literature to use the concept of knowledge spillovers for such knowledge flows, irrespective of...

Increased urbanization, global warming and sustainable growth belong to the major contemporary policy challenges. Today cities are home to more than 50% of the world population, the largest 600 urban centers generate about 60% of global GDP, and the agglomerated areas are responsible for 75% of...

Nowadays it is well-established fact that urban regions and large ones in particular are crucial for promoting creativity, innovation and subsequent economic growth in the economy. There-fore, it is important to focus policies in Europe on how to improve the existing conditions of urban regions...

I have been asked to write a paper over “my urban idol 2050” to be the foundation for a presentation at a session at the ERSA congress in Bratislava in August 2012. No special instructions were given, so I have chosen to write a kind of scenario for the possible future development in the...