Agricultural public facilities for irrigation and drainage play an important role in Japanese agriculture, especially in paddy production. However, the budget for renovation of old facilities was drastically cut in 2010. For prolonging life time and decreasing lifecycle costs of public...

Biodiversity has a prominent role in defining and preserving ecosystem well-being; the analysis of biodiversity effects on agricultural production is well documented. The paper offers empirical evidence on the role of intra-species biodiversity in sustaining cereal production within Italian...

The question whether agglomeration effects are of importance for regional development has a long tradition in regional science. This paper asks if regional characteristics and specifically ag-glomeration effects influence the performance of plants in Germany and, if so, in which direction....

This paper presents a theoretical approach to solve the main problems faced to explain the relationship between aggregate economic growth and the urban structure. The most significant conclusion reached is that there is a theoretical relationship between aggregate economic growth and urban...

The aim of the paper is to test the Benhabib and Spiegel (2005) productivity (TFP) catch-up framework on European regions. Differences in the stock of human capital across regions are hypothesized to be the cause of differences in the speed by which follower regions converge and catch-up with...

Dairy production has long been the most important production line in Finnish and Norwegian agriculture. Prior to Finland joining the EU, farm structure as well as national agricultural policy was very similar in the two countries. In this paper, we explore development and differences in...

Increased productivity is one of the main drivers of economic growth. Considering the increasing importance of the service sector in many economies studies of productivity in service firms are essential, but still rare. Questions concerning the underlying reasons for productivity differences in...

This paper attempts to analyze the impact of knowledge and knowledge spillovers on regional total factor productivity (TFP) in Europe. Regional patent stocks are used as a proxy for knowledge, and TFP is measured in terms of a superlative index. We follow Fischer et. al (2008) by using a...

The present work assess the effects of MAR and Jacob's type agglomeration economies on a sample of firms in the machineries and textiles industries in Greece for the periods 1989-91 and 1999-01. The analysis employs a stochastic production frontier function and allows agglomeration economies to...