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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

In 2008/2009, the recent economic crisis affected German engine building industries. The incoming orders dropped dramatically. As some regions especially in western and southern Germany are strongly dependent on such industries, the companies as well as the regions, where the companies are...

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...