Since Putnam's work on social capital, the Italian regional case has been a very rich source of both data and theories about the origins of large and persistent differences in local stocks of social capital, and about the impact of such differences on economic performances. The Italian case is...

By studying the interaction between social capital and decentralization, we show that political decentralization can be a source of divergence across heterogeneous regions. In particular, we claim that since the local endowments of social capital display their effect on the economy mainly...

This paper aims at assessing whether dualistic mechanisms represent a significant component of the aggregate labour productivity convergence observed across the European regions in the 1980s. The potential of an explanation of convergence based - in part, at least - on the existence of dualism...

International data on per-capita income show that, in the last few years, growth in some countries specialized in tourism was faster than in the average country included in the World Bank-World Development Indicators. Fast growth in tourism countries might be due to fast, unsustainable...

Differences in productivity levels represent a major component of the large cross-country differences in per capita income observed in international datasets and even in some regional ones. Nowadays, few economists would dispute neither this finding, nor that differences in productivity reflects...

Specializing in tourism is an option available to a number of less developed countries and regions. But is it a good option? To answer this question, we have compared the relative growth performance of 14 "tourism countries" within a sample of 143 countries, observed during the period 1980-95....

Is tourism an opportunity for lagging countries in the elusive quest for growth (Easterly, 2002)? Recent empirical evidence suggests that the answer is a cautious yes. Aggregate cross-country data show that tourism specialization is likely to be associated with higher per capita GDP growth rates...

Having grown faster than world GDP since the 1950s, international tourism is today one of the most important tradable sectors, with expenditure on tourist goods and services representing some 8% of total world export receipts and 5% of world GDP. Starting from a broad perspective, two main facts...