Knowledge drives the growth of nations and regions in a competitive space-economy. Hence, we would expect a strong correlation between investments in R&D, knowledge and learning processes, on the one hand, and productivity increases, on the other. However, the empirical evidence shows consistent...

Over the last few years, the world economy has gone through a severe period of economic downturn, the worst since the end of WWII. Although the crisis has been widely covered on the media, less common knowledge is the fact that the crisis has engendered responses in the economic systems, in the...

By applying the smile curve concept to regional value added growth rather than to levels, the paper claims that local value-added growth increases when a region is specialised in scarce natural resources or scarce human skills within a GVC. Under these circumstances, in fact, the region can...

Regional economics - an established discipline for several decades - has gone through a rapid pace of change in the past decade and several new perspectives have emerged. At the same time the methodology has shown surprising development. This volume brings together contributions looking at new...