The paper emphasizes the role of social capital in some particular rural clusters like the French "Poles d'Excellence Rurale" (PER) and the U.S. Rural Knowledge Clusters (RKC). The recent revival of the literature on social capital considers this resource as highly valuable when considering the...

Russia inherited pattern of economic activity location from the Soviet Union, where the main forms of industry organization were territorial-production complexes (TPC) - networks of industrial organizations united by a single technological process or the chain of raw materials processing. In a...

This chapter introduces the digital finance cluster in Bulgaria and analyses how it performs against the Four Fundamentals introduced in Breznitz (2021). The Fintech sector in Bulgaria traces its origins in the Communist Era, with the first applications of digital financial technologies aiming...

In machine learning and data science literature, clustering is the task of dividing the observations (data points) into several categories in such a way that data points falling into one group are being dissimilar than the data points falling to the other groups such that the variation within a...

Random forests are invariant and robust estimators that can fit complex interactions between input data of different types and binary, categorical, or continuous outcome variables, including those with multiple dimensions. In addition to these desirable properties, random forests impose a...

This paper investigates the main determinants of economic growth in the European Union from a regional perspective. The analysis is based on a recently available dataset from the European Cluster Observatory covering 253 European regions over the period 2002-2008. In addition to the traditional...