During the last century there has been a huge reduction in trade costs at almost every spatial scale impulsed not only by technological advances applied to transport and communication systems, but also by the spread of regional trade agreements and other related schemes. This estringent fall has...

We develop a theory of economic disintegration that features both endogenously formed tax and trade policies. We show very generally that the economic disintegration of a country from an economic union leads to a deeper integration of international trade institutions. Moreover, we set up a...

The paper evaluates the impact of the EU Eastern enlargement 2004 on the economic performance of border regions located at the frontier to the new member states in the East. These regions were assumed to be particularly affected by the enlargement because of their geographic proximity to the new...

This article deals with the domestic location of German multinational firms which have affiliates in the Czech Republic. Due to the common border the Czech Republic represents an attractive target country for both vertical and horizontal direct investments. In the year 2009 the sum of direct and...

The last decades have witnessed the rise of a new wave of economic regionalism, the most remarkable example of which is the European Union. Regional economic integration is generally interpreted either as an attempt to resist the centrifugal forces of globalisation by strenghtening economic ties...

The spatial agglomeration of economic activities play a crucial role on productivity but the composition of such an agglomeration is what really matters. There exists an ongoing debate between the predominance of the effects of agglomeration from specialization and diversity. This paper aims to...

The paper accounts for the determinants of inward foreign direct investment in business services across the EU-27 regions. Together with the traditional variables considered in the literature (market size, market quality, agglomeration economies, labour cost, technology, human capital), we focus...

Research on territorial innovation systems has traditionally put a very strong emphasis on intra-economy collaborative linkages as they allow valuable tacit knowledge to flow between co-located firms and institutions. Frequent face-to-face contact between producers and demanding users combined...

The accelerated growth of the service sector is one of the characteristics of the actual pattern of global growth. In Brazil, it is possible to point to a move towards a 'service economy' following the global standard. However, it cannot say that Brazil is regionally services intensive, ie, the...