Using data envelopment analysis, we calculate indices of total factor productivity (TFP), efficiency and technological change for the manufacturing sectors of 68 European NUTS1 regions over the period 1986-2002. We subsequently examine these indices using exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA)...

Recent theoretical advances have emphasised the importance of localised increasing returns to scale in understanding both the regional growth and agglomeration processes. However, considerable empirical controversy still exists over whether returns to scale are constant or increasing....

A second and an independent J-curve effect emerges where import expenditures depend on wealth and where current account imbalance feeds back on itself through its effect on asset accumulation. The combination of the two J-curves in conjunction gives rise to a wide range of dynamic possibilities...

Over the past two decades, China has embarked on an ambitious program of expressway network expansion. By facilitating market integration, this program aims both to promote efficiency at the national level and to contribute to the catch-up of lagging inland regions with prosperous Eastern ones....

This paper analyses the empirical relevance of the 2009 World Development Report's 3D framework for the explanation of spatial productivity disparities within Chongqing municipality's non-primary sector. In doing so, it presents evidence of a significant role for distance in determining these...

Abstract Verdoorn's law is estimated in a spatial econometric framework for individual manufacturing industries using EU regional data. Estimates of encompassing returns to scale are large, but other explanatory variables, including measures of industrial specialization and diversity, tend to be...

In the past dozen years, a literature has developed arguing that urbanization has unfolded differently in post-independence Sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the developing world, with implications for African economic growth overall. While African countries are more urbanized than other...

Long-run economic growth is analysed in a global model with many small countries prone to national level total factor productivity shocks. The possibility of precautionary saving or dissaving is a function of the higher-order moments and the cross-moments of the factor income distributions,...

Findings of conditional convergence are usually interpreted within a neoclassical growth framework. This follows from the methodology of testing for conditional convergence, whereby the estimating equation is explicitly derived from a neoclassical growth model. Given this explicit derivation,...