The southern European periphery suffered a severe setback in its catching-up process versus Western Europe after the financial crisis with GDP dropping by 10% between 2008 and 2012 and unemployment increasing to 20% for Greece, Portugal and Spain. We analyze first the reason for this setback,...

In the context of wide regional disparities emerging in the process of development, the banks have an additional responsibility in India. That responsibility is to enter the under developed regions and to mobilize and channelize resources into local economic activities such that local...

This paper analyses total factor productivity growth in the unorganized manufacturing sector in India using several rounds of the large scale National Sample Survey state-level data for 15 major Indian states for the period 1978-79 to 2000-01. Data Envelopment Analysis is used to compute...

For several countries during a transition process economic and institutional reforms are frequently implemented in an inconsistent way. The prospect of EU membership require and facility reforms and thereby leads to increased government credibility. This contribution derives an estimate of the...

In this paper, we study how local border reforms affect economic activity. To do so, we make use of large-scale municipal merger reforms in Germany to assess the effect of local border changes on the distribution of activity in space, an issue that has not been addressed in existing literature....

A recent literature suggests that arbitrarily designed administrative borders are an important reason why sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the least developed regions on the globe. Accordingly, administrative border reforms may be a way to promote growth on the African continent. In this paper,...