This paper investigates the role played by public capital in increasing the productivity levels in Italy. For the construction of the regional series for the public capital over the period 1996-2002, the study benefits from the use of the rich dataset on public expenditure, recently published by...

The picture on disparities in productivity growth and in unemployment across European regions reveals the existence of a slow and not very systematic convergence of labor productivity toward a common level, and of an even more uncertain convergence of unemployment rates. This paper uses a...

In this paper we study two closely related issues. First, the role of technology heterogeneity and diffusion in the convergence of GDP per worker observed across the European regions, in the absence of data on regional TFP. Second, the spatial pattern of the observed regional heterogeneity in...

Our aim is to address the problem of measuring how much of the convergence observed across European regions is due to convergence in technology versus convergence in capital-labour ratios. To this aim, we first develop a growth model where technology accumulation in lagging regions depends on...

Regional differentials in per capita income and labour productivity in Italy is one of the most notable cases of regional inequality and have attracted attention from economists from all over the world since the 1950s. In this paper we first aim at yielding a comprehensive description of the...

The recent theoretical and empirical works on economic growth based on Solow’s model have generally neglected the role played by the sectoral mix and structural change on aggregate growth. However, as many development economists have remarked, sectors are characterized by enormous differences...

This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part we review the main results of a typical New Economic Geography and Growth (NEGG) model (Baldwin and Martin, 2003) and assess the contribution of this literature to the issue of long-run income gaps between countries. In the second part we...

Relazione per la Sessione plenaria su “Crescita regionale e urbana nel mercato globale” XXI Conferenza Annuale AISRe - Palermo 20-22 settembre 2000

Our aim is to address the problem of measuring how much of the convergence that we observe is due to convergence in technology versus convergence in capital-labour ratios, in the absence of data on the level of technology. To this aim, we first develop a growth model where technology...

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...