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...

In most decision making situations more than one criterion is involved and, as a consequence, confusion can arise if there is no logical and well structured decision-making process in place. The multi-criteria analysis (MCA) constitutes a tool that can help evaluate the relative importance of...

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...

Among the EU countries, Romania displays the highest share of rural population (45%), most of it employed in agriculture. Moreover, there is a significant variation between the eight NUTS 2 regions with regards to the urban distribution and dynamics, with important intra-regional differences...

The economic and social cohesion policy of the European Union has two inter-related components, namely the vertical cohesion, referring to the alleviation of social disparities and the solidarity with the disadvantaged social groups, and the horizontal cohesion, which concentrates on the...

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...