1. Aims of the paper: in this paper we analysed a number of European regions that in the last ten to fifteen years experienced a process of industrial reconversion moving from traditional sectors-based economies to knowledge economies. With the aim of shaping the transformation paths driving...

Entrepreneurship is more and more considered a key driver of economic performance. Recent works in the literature on this research area (see Saxenian, 1994; Audretsch and Keilbach, 2004; Cooke, 2004; Cassia, Fattore and Paleari, 2006) suggest that there is a positive link between entrepreneurship capital,...

Since the Lisbon agenda in 2000, Europe stated the goal to become the most advanced knowledge economy in the world relying specifically on the increase and strengthen of its human capital and technological endowments. However, given the presence of localized externalities in the knowledge...

The paper investigates the patterns of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) convergence across Italian regions, in the period 1982-2001. According to the main theoretical approaches, two different concepts of convergence may be devised, strongly intertwined. Beta-convergence applies when poor,...