The degree and the way of upgrading differ widely per industry. This article tries to give some new insights in these differences by linking the concept of upgrading to that of the knowledge base. Moreover, we try to identify barriers to upgrading as well as the appropriate spatial scale on...

China's economic and diplomatic ascendancy over the past decade has been nothing short of phenomenal in terms of world history. It has seen its influence on the world stage grow from being a bit part player at the start of the 20th century, when its territory sovereignty was encroached upon by...

After reading Richard Florida’s work (e.g. Florida, 2003) on the creative industry and on the importance of the creative class for urban development in post-industrial economies, many cities in Europe and the USA have started to invest in creativity in general and in design in particular. Much...

“Chimerica” illustrates the interactions between a Chinese model of high savings, overinvestment and export-led growth and the American model of leverage investment, credit consumption and finance-led growth. The collapse of the U.S model, linked with the unregulated derivatives market,...

This paper is aimed at analysing the decision of the Chinese central bank to reform the exchange rate of the national currency and to gauge the effects of this change in regime on the Chinese economy and the world currency markets. Although many nations have been largely disappointed by the...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the main features of world cotton market by focusing on the role of China, and analysing the effect of predetermined macroeconomic variables on Chinese cotton market. First, a global overview of cotton market is given; after that, the main reasons for...

The paper stresses how Italian and Chinese SMEs internationalize according to different approaches. Indeed, in the former case firms may move abroad because they follow the so-called lead firms, that act as a meta-national body, whereas in the latter case SMEs are committed to exports and/or...