In the US and Europe many clusters initiatives have recently been launched. National and regional governments have been defining and implementing clusters policies and programmes with the aim to identifying, launching and finally consolidating international competitive clusters in their...

After joining CEFTA in 1997, Romania established a relatively stable group of partner countries for its agri-food trade. Several factors contributed to the stability in time of this group, firstly the existence or establishment of preferential trade agreements, the geographical proximity, and...

Clusters and cluster policy has become a widespread phenomena. The general thought shows that, somehow, clusters are directly related to business competitiveness and regional growth. In this context, the Spanish Ministry of Industry has implemented a cluster policy since 2007 known as the AEIs...

In the current new competitive environment, smart specialization has emerged strongly as a territorial development model to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of economic systems. An aspect from which it differs from previous models is the special emphasis on governance. In this...

In the post-accession period, a common feature of the international agri-food trade of the new Member States was a significant increase in the volume and value of export and import flows, thus contributing to the increase in intra- and extra-Community trade. Despite these increases in total...

The accumulation of the human capital stock plays a key role to explain the economic performance across regions. However, empirical evidence for this claim has been not very convincing, probably due to low quality of the data. This paper provides a robustness analysis of alternative human...

The degree of comovement of economic activity across states or regions is an issue of utmost importance to policymakers. Asymmetric business cycles are often seen as an impediment to the formation of a common currency area. However, it has been argued that a common monetary policy in itself...

Romania's accession to the European Union meant the free access of its agri-food products on the European Single market, without tariff barriers or export quotas, as well as a better access on the international markets. At the same time, it meant the free access on the Romanian market of...