Foreign trade and foreign direct investments (FDI) are key elements for economic development and growth of both a country and its regions. This paper focuses on foreign trade and FDI in Austrian regions (Bundesländer). Unfortunately, data on regional trade in Austria is only available on a very...

In this paper we synthesize and adopt the recently developed methods in efficiency analysis to the case of comparison of regions within a country. We take Ukrainian regions as a subject of investigation, yet the same toolkit can be applied to test disputable differences in productivity for many...

Authoritarian leaders rely on regional officials for both political support and the fulfillment of their policy objectives. Central leaders face trade-offs between using institutionalized rules for choosing regional officials such as regular rotation and performance incentives, and building a...

Using household data from samples covering 18 provinces in 1988 and 1995, income inequality within and between counties in rural China is assessed. The approach enables us to aggregate average income and income inequality to the levels of provinces and the three regions comprising eastern,...

We use nonparametric production-frontier methods to decompose the growth of labor productivity of Chinese provinces in the post-reform period. These techniques, combined with kernel density estimates, allow us to decompose the shift in the distribution of labor productivity without the need for...

In today’s economies, knowledge is the key ingredient for prosperity. However, it is hard to measure this intangible asset appropriately. Standard economic models mostly rely on common measures such as enrollment rates and international test scores. However, these proxies focus rather on the...

This work calculates coefficients of spatial inequalities of wealth amongst Brazilian municipalities, for each year for the period from 1920 to 2016, states of the federation, from 1939 to 2017, and amongst municipalities from each of the five Brazilians' macro-regions, from 1920 to 2016. The...

Using newly digitized unemployment insurance claims data we construct a historical monthly unemployment series for U.S. states going back to January 1947. The constructed series are highly correlated with the Bureau of Labor Statics' state-level unemployment data, which are only available from...

This paper investigates the relationship between devolution and regional disparities by looking at the case of Italy. By integrating the relevant quantitative and qualitative evidence, it attempts to answer two questions. Did the devolutionary process exert a positive influence on regional...

Interregional differentials in nominal wages in the Russian Federation are huge compared to other countries. Using the NOBUS micro-data and a methodology based on the estimation of the wage equation augmented by aggregate regional characteristics, we show that these differentials have a...