This paper investigates whether localization economies as brought forward by Marshall (1890) or urbanization economies as mentioned by Jacobs (1970) are more decisive for regional gross value added per capita. Our novel approach is to explicitly allow for interdependencies between these two...

In recent times, there has been a renewed interest in cluster policies for supporting industrial and regional development. Prominent economics like Porter and Krugman emphasise the role of clusters in regional competition and show in which way clusters can positively affect competition by...

The aim of this study is to examine the determinants of international banking. In doing so, it utilizes data from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). In particular, the primal variable of interest is drawn from BIS Consolidated Statistics and refers to banks' foreign claims. is defined...

In this paper we try to identify manufacturing and service clusters in Spain, using data from Mercantile Registers of 2006. The proposed methodology partially follows contributions of Duranton and Overman (2005), Brenner (2003 and 2004) and Ellison and Glaser (1997), but departing from them we...

This paper examines the empirical relationship between agglomeration and economic growth for a panel of 48 Central and Eastern European regions from 1995 to 2006. By agglomeration, we mean the within-regional concentration of aggregate economic activity, which we measure using the 'topographic'...

Empirical evidence about income convergence among regions and countries is inconclusive and it is necessary to clarify the economic and institutional conditions for convergence. We investigate movements in the income distribution among regions in an integrated market with high mobility of labor,...

In this paper an attempt is made to assess the hypothesis of re- gional club-convergence, using a spatial panel analysis combined with B-Splines. In this context, a 'convergence-club' is conceived as a group of regions that in the long-run move towards steady-state equilib- rium, approximated in...

Being competitive in a globalized world have several meanings according to the topic taken into account. This paper focuses on the attractiveness of places, as we assume that being a popular place is an advantage for global competition. And our main question here is to catch the mental maps of...

Regional politicians regard the cluster concept as a key factor for promoting regional economic performance. They refer to a comprehensive set of theoretical and empirical literature which provides the clusters' positive impact on regional development. Recent studies dealing with that topic...

The EU Framework Programme (FP) belongs to the most important instruments promoting transnational collaborative R&D projects in Europe. Its main objective is to initiate cross-border complementarities in order to exploit knowledge resources and to conduct large scale research. Within the EU FPs...