In 2009 production of office furniture in South Africa accounted for US$ 215 million. Although affected by the global downturn last year, the country is likely to show a surprising recovery during the middle quarters of 2010. The increasing trends in consumers demand, the ongoing relevant public...

The office furniture production in Japan accounts for worth US$ 3,500 million. The economy relies on huge flows of money from abroad, that in 2008 reached their peak increasing by 10.7% if compared with the previous year. The level of concentration of the industry is extremely high, with the...

This paper draws and expands from a recent ex-post evaluation carried out for the European Commission aimed at assessing the long term effects produced by a sample of ten major infrastructures in the Transport and Environment sectors and interpreting the key determinants of the observed...

This paper briefly reviews some of the empirical findings of a research team of the University of Milan on privatization in different countries. The discussed effects include: effects on consumers, tax-payers, workers, shareholders; on aggregate growth, public finance, firms’ productivity,...

This paper comments an important book by Maurice FG. Scott, «A New View of Economic Growth». The main contribution of the book is to show that capital investment can sustain endogenous growth, as it embodies technical progress. Neoclassical theories of growth are based on an error in...

This paper supports the view that the deep roots of the current global crisis, which has taken the form of a mainly financial crisis, are related to a global fundamental unbalance in income distribution. There are two dimensions of the unbalance. The first one is between capital and labour...

This paper illustrates the story of the Port of Gioia Tauro, a major infrastructure investment co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund in the period 1994-1998, but whose origin dates back to the beginning of the 1970s. It draws from a recent ex-post evaluation carried out for the...

This paper presents the basic principles of the EU approach to cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of infrastructure projects, as embodied in the recently issued CBA Guide. After an introduction about the objectives and instruments of the 2007-2013 EU Cohesion Policy, and in particular the legal...

Hungary is the fourth home furniture consumer country among the New European Members after Poland, Czech Republic and Romania. Home furniture consumption reaches a value of about Euro 1 billion. Birth of Furniture Malls (such as Max City), the limited presence of specialist outlets and the...

This report offers a comprehensive picture of the office furniture market in Spain, providing trends in office furniture production and consumption, office furniture imports and exports, office furniture prices. The analysis of the office furniture sector in Spain covers: macro-economic...