The rise and fall of De Lorean Motor Cars Limited (DMCL) has been traditionally interpreted as the result either of John De Loreanś psychological flaws or as confirming the supposedly inherent weaknesses in activist industrial policy. However, when the episode is examined in more detail,...

This paper aims to redefine the term competitiveness to enhance its usefulness for the evaluation of country performance and for policy conclusions. We attempt to establish a definition that is adequate if economic policy strives for a new growth path that is more dynamic, socially inclusive and...

Most of the time the budget constraints in the socialist economies were harder than in developing countries and no less hard than in developed countries. The soft budget constraints (SBC) in socialist economies were not pervasive, as most authors believe, but selective, i.e. involved...

In this paper we propose a novel sectoral taxonomy integrating three different attributes of sectors, namely i) the strategic dimension reflected into their belonging to different classes of the Pavitt taxonomy, ii) the capacity to create jobs both internally and externally with respect to their...

The paper discusses the practical possibilities of achieving increased downstream processing and the policies that are commonly used for this purpose. It reviews the reasons why forward vertical integration is not always an optimal choice for extractive industry companies. It finds little...

A national-champions-related industrial policy has become (again) en vogue among European politicians. Against this background, our work orders different types of national champions along the industry lifecycle. Different types of locally bound externalities appear along the lifecycle. In a...