The competitiveness of firms in a global economic environment is an essential element in development strategy, but simply creating an open economy will not suffice to stimulate competitiveness if innovation is lacking. This is the major finding of this cross-country and multi-industry study...

The growing interest in clusters, understood mainly in terms of spatial agglomerations of enterprises and related supplier and service industries, can be traced back to two changes in the competitive environment of the firm that became increasingly evident over the 1970s and 1980s. These were...