Along time the European Union (EU) has been pointed as the most succeeded example of regional integration. Now, this example has been cruelly shaken by the EZ (Euro Zone) crisis, originating increasing doubts about the integration process. It is evident that the proposed solutions for attacking...

The idea of a Europe of regions has appeared in Western Europe in the 60s. Also in the 60s the first cooperation between neighboring regions created on the borders of France, Switzerland and Germany. The opportunities of the economic development with future EU Member States should not be...

In this paper we propose a new small area estimation methodology aimed at the estimation of Value Added, Labor Cost and related competitiveness indicators for subsets of the population of Italian small and medium sized manufacturing firms classified according to geographical region, industrial...

Strong regional clusters are increasingly seen as a response to economic globalization by policy makers and regional development agencies. The reasoning of competitive advantages of countries and regions with enterprises organized in clusters has mainly been popularized by Porter (1990, 1998,...

This paper investigates whether localization economies as brought forward by Marshall (1890) or urbanization economies as mentioned by Jacobs (1970) are more decisive for regional gross value added per capita. Our novel approach is to explicitly allow for interdependencies between these two...