Several empirical works have shown the robust and positive relation between growth and innovation at macroeconomic level and between firm economic performance and innovation at microeconomic level. However, the economists have had less opportunities to study such linkages during severe global...

The shifting of labour demand towards relatively more skilled workers has been a hot issue in the economic field for many years. A consolidated explanation for the upskilling phenomenon is that technological-organisational changes have driven the labour demand with detrimental consequences for...

The paper investigates empirically the impact that outsourcing strategies have on the labour productivity of firms embedded in a local production system characterized by idiosyncratic techno-economic and organizational features. A diachronic cross-section econometric model of the productivity...

This paper is an empirical analysis of the interaction between the dynamics of demand, productivity and employment in nine industrial countries, viz. The United States, Canada, Japan, West Germany, France, Italy; the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium, from 1960-1990. Its theoretical...

The EU 2020 strategy relies on innovation as the core driver of economic dynamics. The present Forum discusses the strategies established by the European Commission and the member states for the intensifi cation of innovative activities. Analyses of often neglected aspects of innovation policy,...

The paper aims at investigating how far transaction costs economics (TCE) concurs in the explanation of outsourcing decisions in firms characterized by “thick’ industrial relations, that is where unions and employees are involved in, and are sometimes able to affect, the relative managerial...

The paper aims at ‘embedding’ the outsourcing firm by considering it as a four-fold unit of analysis: i.e. as an organizational, production, industrial and innovation unit. Theoretical correlations between outsourcing decisions and outsourcing variables are formulated and then tested with...