Industries necessarily differ with respect to their type of geographical concentration. When some industries are overrepresented in urban areas (urban concentration), then some other industries must be overrepresented in rural areas (rural concentration). Unfortunately, the existing measures of...

The scope of the paper is to examine relationship between quality of administrative environment for business and propensity to become entrepreneur. Two different approaches to business activity are taken into account: opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor,...

In this paper we try to identify manufacturing and service clusters in Spain, using data from Mercantile Registers of 2006. The proposed methodology partially follows contributions of Duranton and Overman (2005), Brenner (2003 and 2004) and Ellison and Glaser (1997), but departing from them we...

This paper investigates the main determinants of economic growth in the European Union from a regional perspective. The analysis is based on a recently available dataset from the European Cluster Observatory covering 253 European regions over the period 2002-2008. In addition to the traditional...

This paper aims at develop an evaluation of the functional polycentrism of Portuguese municipalities. For that purpose, we develop a critical assessment of the concept of polycentrism and functional polycentrism whose assumptions guide most of the policies of regional planning, and present the...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate concerning the role of heterogeneity for the GC competitive advantage. With this aim, we focus on different sources of heterogeneity and study how the different level of heterogeneity affects the performance of GCs. Specifically, we consider...