Europe 2020 is a very ambitious strategy adopted by the European Commission for the coming decade. Its main target is to make Europe'(tm)s economy become smart, sustainable and inclusive. The Lisbon Strategy was first adopted in 2000, but during the 2005 mid-term review, the Lisbon Strategy was...

As a consequence of the 2008-2009 international financial crisis the European Union is undergoing per-haps its most difficult period since the beginnings of the European integration. The response to this challenge includes decisions and planned steps to strengthen fiscal discipline in the member...

In this article we summerize the views of the most umportant stakeholders concerning the new long term program of the European Union: ‘Europe 2020 A strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth which determines the next few years of all of the European countries and their citizens. The...

Business Angels are private individuals (or syndicates) who supply venture capital to businesses, mainly small start-up firms, in an informal investment market setting. This paper presents a preliminary analysis from the first phase of a research project that explores the emergence of Business...

There are signs that public policy is catching on to an understanding that not only start-up firms can achieve high rates of growth. More research is needed to find out what the needs of more mature enterprises might be, before policy lurches away from supporting early stage companies.

To allocate central government funds among regional development agencies, we look for mechanisms that satisfy three important criteria: efficiency, (individual and coalitional) strategy proofness (a.k.a. dominant strategy incentive compatibility), and fairness. We show that only a uniform...

Britain's coalition government, elected in 2010, is making radical changes to the institutions for local economic development in England, scrapping New Labour's Regional Development Agencies and setting up weak, non-statutory Local Enterprise Partnerships. However, sharp regional differences...

The investiture of a UK Coalition Government in 2010 heralded the (ongoing) production of new sub-national geographies of governance in England. Of primary concern is the disbanding of the English regions, outside of London, which were New Labour’s preferred scale for...