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...

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...

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...