The economic and financial crisis has generated a significant amount of adverse effects in all European economies, although with substantial differences by countries. For Spain the effects have been severe. From the last third of the last century until the middle of 2008 the economy experienced...

Industries have varying abilities to benefit from externalities associated with geographical concentration, and are also likely to suffer in different degrees from crowding costs. This makes industries differ in their concentration process. We hypothesize that firms with low education levels...

In this paper, we undertake an in-depth inquiry into the nature of sharing externalities, and study how they affect the market outcome. We show that the key thing for understanding sharing externalities is the interplay between two forces: the specialization/complexity effect, on the one hand,...

Changing pattern of global specialization and trade has affected the regional economic landscape in Europe significantly during the last decades, often even more than endogenous factors or policy measures. After a period of conversion, processes of diversion has reentered the scene, particularly...

In this paper, we analyse Friedrich List's contribution to the modern theory of economic development. We argue that Friedrich List saw economic development as a combination of a sectorial division of labour (following Adam Smith, 1776) and a geographical division of labour across regions and...

In this paper, we constructs a model with two-region, two sector and two types of workers. One type of workers has a comparative advantage in agricultural production and mobile between two regions, while the other type of workers has a comparative advantage in producing manufactured goods and...

By today smart specialization has become a crucial part of the growth strategy of the European Union. Smart specialization is an innovative approach for the economic transformation of regions, a complex development strategy that builds on the unique characteristics and values of regions, and...

Large metropolitan regions with pollution, congestion and high rents remain the supernatural economic places. The mystery of what exactly raises productivity in large cities continues. Going back to the famous pin factory of Adam Smith, the answer might be that city workers are able to...

Urban economists hypothesize that industrial diversity matters for urban growth and development, but metrics for empirically testing this relationship are limited to simple concentration metrics (e.g. location quotient) or summary diversity indices (e.g. Gini, Herfindahl). As shown by recent...