The firms' international fragmentation of production has recently widened its focus from outsourcing of intermediates to off-shoring of business services such as software program development and international call centre networks. Although a large number of business services are intangible and...

Sino‐European trade relations have been controversially discussed mainly, if not only, because of the increasing European Union’s bilateral trade deficit with China. As from the European perspective trade with China becomes more important, the structural adjustment process of the Chinese...

One of the top priorities to improve the European Union's growth performance is the creation ofsingle market for services. The directive on services adopted by the Parliament and the Council by the end of 2006 aims at removing barriers to the free movement of service providers on the internal...

Innovations in information- and telecommunication technology render the proximity requirement between business partners obsolete and make business service outsourcing via cross-border trade more feasible. Although the (service-led) growth prospects have been widely discussed, evidence at the...

While previous studies highlight the importance of the manufacturing sector in the economy, we argue that rather backbone services play a key role for economic growth. We perform an Input-Output analysis to determine the linkages between backbone services and manufacturing in South Africa. We...

Im Zuge der Krise hat sich Zypern vom südeuropäischen Erfolgsmodell zum Schuldenstaat entwickelt. Die Autoren analysieren, wie es dazu kommen konnte und welche Möglichkeiten Zypern bleiben, um den wirtschaftlichen Niedergang zu stoppen und auf einen Wachstumspfad zurückzukehren.