Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade liberalization provides incentive to change institutions in two ways. On the one hand, trade leads to specialization according to comparative advantage, expanding the industries that do...

The paper analyses the national and regional European maritime clusters according to the sea basin division proposed by the European Union Integrated Maritime Policy: Atlantic and Arctic oceans; Baltic, Black, Mediterranean and North seas. Besides the identification of all maritime sectors by...

The article deals with the problem of West European and Nordic countries small economies as well as ultra-small autonomous territories of Alands and Faeroes island's development. The latter are considered as the <<competitive sub-peripheries> areas due to the special industrial organization development, stimulated by the...</<competitive>

We set out a small, open economy model of a city, one with local housing, government production and a non-traded good. We observe that a positive shift in labor productivity in the export sector generally results in a larger, higher-wage and more densely settled city. Production of the local...

Is tourism an opportunity for lagging countries in the elusive quest for growth (Easterly, 2002)? Recent empirical evidence suggests that the answer is a cautious yes. Aggregate cross-country data show that tourism specialization is likely to be associated with higher per capita GDP growth rates...

The process of European integration has introduced a valuable empirical example on the impact of economic integration on income convergence. Many empirical papers confirm the income convergence within the new member states and between the new and old members. At the same time it is found that...

Recently, there has been wide interest in the "economics" of population aging. Demographic change has crucial consequences for economic behavior; it e.g. implies that consumption and investment decisions vary over the life-cycle. The latter has important implications for economic growth, whereas...

For spatial data with a sufficiently long time dimension, the concept of global cointegration has been recently included in the econometrics research agenda. Global cointegration arises when non-stationary time series are cointegrated both within and between spatial units. In this paper, we...

The present study aims to verify whether the balance-of-payments constrained growth approach is suitable for explaining the Portuguese growth performance during the last decades. For that, we adopt "Thirlwall's Law" that predicts actual growth by the ratio of the exports growth relative to the...

The balance of payments can act as a constraint to the rate of growth of output, on putting a limit to the growth in the level of demand to which supply can adapt. This effect might be even stronger for regional economies, presumably more integrated among them. In this paper, we examine this...