This paper examines the role of political alignment and the electoral business cycle on municipality revenues in Greece for the period 2003-2010. A panel dataset combining local and national elections with local budgets is used to run a fixed-effects econometric model. The findings suggest that...

This paper examines the role of political alignment and the electoral business cycle on municipality revenues in Greece for the period 2003-2010. A panel dataset combining local and national elections with local budgets is used to run a fixed-effects econometric model. The findings suggest that...

Despite being one of the smallest countries in the OECD, Israel is marked by significant socio-economic disparities, which have a clear spatial dimension. Ethnic and religious groups with weak socio-economic outcomes are not benefitting from the thriving high-tech sector in the centre of the...

Despite large regional policy expenditures, regional inequalities in Europe have not narrowed substantially over the last two decades, and by some measures have even widened. Income differences across States have fallen, but inequalities between regions within each State have risen. European...

Japan consists of many small inhabited islands in addition to four main islands. We examine the impact of fiscal expenditure and the number of tourists on per capita taxable income in remote islands using panel data analysis. The results show that both fiscal expenditure and population size have...

This article questions the integration processes in three small cross-border metropolitan areas: Luxembourg, Basel and Geneva. By referring to an original analysis framework, it evaluates the nature and intensity of the functional and institutional integration and highlights the elements that...

This paper investigates the theoretical backgrounds of the “cluster” and proposes a framework aiming at drawing the contour of cluster theory. The profundity of the notion of ‘clusters’ is arguably conditional on the coherence of three fundamental issues associated with the concept: 1)...

While there is an increasing body of literature testing for a correlation between access to regional markets and economic activity, little evidence is available for market access being of causal importance for economic development. This paper investigates the impact of exogenous variation to...

It is a very generally accepted view that financial support received from the European Union generates a large growth surplus. The potential effects of the structural funds calculated in model simulations carried out by the European Commission support the

Microcredit and microfinance emerged in the 1970’s in Bangladesh and other developing countries and expanded rapidly worldwide as a business model financially sustainable and able to fight poverty and social exclusion. Empirical evidence confirms microcredit ability to mitigate poverty but its...