The EU has experienced different options to support the emergence of champions: (i) targeted support for strategic sectors and large technology initiatives (e.g. Airbus, Ariane, HDTV and ESPRIT); (ii) a support of declining sectors with the ECSC Treaty; and (iii) an emphasis on horizontal...

In the year 2000 at a meeting in Lisbon, leaders of the European Union (EU) articulated a set of goals for the Union, which have come to be called the Lisbon Strategy or Lisbon Agenda. The agenda had three main goals: to promote growth through innovation, to create a learning economy, and to...

There is little doubt that SMEs plays a vital role in development of an underdeveloped economy, but still this sector is facing multifarious problems relating to raw materials, power, land, marketing, transport, technical facilities, and finance etc and due to these constraints it is getting...

This paper offers a concise survey on the literature of growth empirics applying to DCs. It is argued that there is a number of important stylised facts of economic growth relevant to DCs which are not included in the corresponding lists of Kaldor and Romer. In contrary to the usual procedure,...

Evidence from a current panel of harmonized worldwide data highlights a robust negative effect of income inequality on economic growth that we trace back to its transmission channels. Less equal societies tend to have less educated populations and higher fertility rates, but not necessarily...

In this paper we conduct a meta-analysis to examine the link between R&D spending and economic growth in the EU and other regions. The results suggest that the growth-enhancing effect of R&D in the EU15 countries does not differ from that in other countries in general, but it is less significant...

The paper examines whether the Arab Spring phenomenon was predictable by complete elimination in the dispersion of core demands for better governance, more jobs and stable consumer prices. A methodological innovation of the Generalized Methods of Moments is employed to assess the feasibility and...

A key factor for a stable and solid development is the gain in labor productivity. The regions that manage to pull out of poverty and improve the living standards of their inhabitants, in fact, need to be able to diversify away from agriculture and other traditional sectors. In doing this, the...

This paper investigates the causes of the "vanishing effect of finance" detected in recent studies. The results highlight that the negative effect of the financial system on growth is mainly driven by advanced economies, whereas finance is still beneficial for income increases in developing...

The link between foreign aid and economic growth remains a controversial issue in the literature, and a large share of the disagreement could be explained by differences in the data employed. Using GDP data from three different versions of the Penn World Table and the World Development...