The Portuguese National Action Plan for Employment (NAP) is the main instrument for the labour market policy. It was adopted in 1998. The NAP transposes to the Portuguese reality the contents of such guidelines, with the adequate adjustments required by the national specificities, establishing...

This is a short essay on open questions in urban economic theory.

Some programs and research networks are dealing with topics associated to the automtive sector and they observe one of the most significative sectores of modern economies. Because of that is so interesting to forecast some possible changes in an horizon of 10 to 20 years. But this exercse must...

Science and technology (S&T) are considered to be a central source, or at least a basic medium, of societal and industrial innovation, while innovation is conceived to basically feed the regeneration of our welfare. The suppliers of S&T in Europe as well as the users of their „products“, are...

We criticize the theories used to explain the size distribution of cities. They take an empirical fact and work backward to obtain assumptions on primitives. The induced theoretical assumptions on consumer behavior, particularly about their inability to insure against the city-level productivity...

The tomahawk bifurcation is used by Fujita et al. (1999) in a model with two regions to explain the formation of a core-periphery urban pattern from an initial uniform distribution. Baldwin et al. (2003) show that the tomahawk bifurcation disappears when the two regions have an uneven population...

Using Japanese prefecture-level data for the years 1979 and 1996, I explore the extent to which inequality, age heterogeneity, and human capital have an effect upon neighborhood trust, which is ordinarily considered as a kind of particularized trust. The major findings are as follows: (1) Income...

The long-term trends of urbanization suggest: not only have more cities formed, but the leading metropolises have grown larger, with a number of peripheral subcenters developing over time. Conventional models of urban growth are limited, in that commuting cost and congestion eventually result in...

In this working paper are present the main provisional results of the first round of a Delphi survey held in Portugal on the automotive sector. It was done under the WorTiS project, developed by IET – Research Centre on Enterprise and Work Innovation, and financed by the Portuguese Ministry of...

In the present paper, the inverted-U shape relationship between growth and inequality found in Chen(2003), is reexamined. We decompose productivity growth into efficiency improvement, capital accumulation and technological progress and then ascertain their determinants by employing a fixed...