The paper is motivated by an interest in how clusters come into being and why they emerge in particular locations. The literature includes two main views on this topic. A first view underlines that new clusters often start out in a particular location more or less by chance, often because some...

A key aspect of understanding how regions grow is the interplay between jobs in the tradable and jobs in the non-tradable sector. Jobs in the tradable sector supply the world market and can therefore move from region to region, but every region has a local demand for non-tradable goods and the...

Europe as we know it, the European Union of 27 countries, has evolved from the European Coal and Steel Union of a few developed countries in a comprehensive economic and political union, which now embraces and unites most of the European continent (EU 2011). Each successive transformation and...

The areas located outside metropolitan areas and also outside areas activated through other big cities are called peripheries. There are big differences between the levels of development of metropolitan and peripheral areas in Poland. There are also great differences in opportunities to...

The paper emphasizes the role of social capital in some particular rural clusters like the French "Poles d'Excellence Rurale" (PER) and the U.S. Rural Knowledge Clusters (RKC). The recent revival of the literature on social capital considers this resource as highly valuable when considering the...

The present paper discourses on how European integration and gradual enlargement has affected the synchronicity in business cycles in EU regions. The analysis, which is conducted on annual data at the NUTSII level, is based on the following grounds: First, it examines the degree of synchronicity...

We suggest an alternative indicator based on the car sales price placed on the Internet for measuring economic inequality among regions. The regional data on car prices in Germany were downloaded from two specialised websites http://www.mobile.de and http://www.autoscout24.de in December 2011....

It is commonly known that the provision of services is currently carried out at a global level. Tertiary activities not only continuously increase their share in total employment and value added, but also in international trade and, as a consequence, in the processes of externationalisation and...

The unprecedented economic rise of Eastern Europe and China in the last two decades has triggered concerns in developed Western market economies about adverse effects for domestic labor markets trough increased import competition. Simultaneously, exports from developed countries to these new...

In this study we evaluate a special form of business support - support to cover costs associated with business counselling. The policy question is whether firms that receive this support within the Regional Business Development programme have a positive outcome compared with firms that do not...