This paper surveys recent research on decentralization and natural disasters. The first part discusses results from theoretical models that have been used to study the issues that arise when natural disasters occur in a country with more than one level of government. The next section discusses...

Reducing disparities among regions within European countries together with economic development is the aim of European and national structural policies. In particular, a European grant contributes to the German governmental program for reducing and equalizing regional unemployment. The goal is...

German structural policy is characterized by a composite indicator with three targets:(1) minimization of unemployment, (2) maximization of GDP, and (3) equalization of regional unemployment rates. The composite indicator with given target weights is maximized subject to budget constraints and...

In this paper we analyze if an 'urban mortality penalty' exists for today's developing countries, repeating the history of industrialized nations during the 19th century. We analyze the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) of 19 Sub-Saharan African countries for differences in child and adult...

The basic purpose of the study is to find a metric-variable of competitiveness for each country's tax regime and to assess the impact of tax regime differentiation across the common market. A country adopting competitive taxation policies manages to attract productive factors, funds and...

The paper investigates empirically how costs per inhabitant depend on population density, considering public water and sewerage industry as example. Diverging from prior work, spatial differences in distribution costs within a German municipality are calculated for both industries by using...

The co-management approach of managing natural resources has increasingly become popular among conservationists and development practitioners since it overcomes the shortcomings of both the centralised management and community-based approaches that hinder harmonization of conflicting interests...

The aim of this work is to test empirically the validity of Gibrat's Law in the growth of cities, using data for all the twentieth century of the complete distribution of cities (without any size restrictions) in three countries: the US, Spain and Italy. For this we use different techniques...

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...

There is little understanding of how clusters evolve, and where. While dynamic analyses of clusters hardly exist, this is especially true for spatial clustering of service industries. We take an evolutionary perspective to describe and explain why the Dutch banking cluster clustered in the...