Do political decentralisation and inter state competition favour innovation and growth? There has long been a lively debate surrounding this question, going back to David Hume and Immanuel Kant. This book is a new attempt to test its veracity. The existing literature tends to assume that the...

Political competition between European countries has often been viewed as being a stimulus to the innovation process and part of the reason why Europe was the first region of the world to experience sustained growth. Countries that fell behind their rivals technologically and economically became...