Services play a key role in enhancing competitiveness of manufacturing and establishing global value chains. Realising the importance of services, a number of countries such as China, Taiwan, Philippines and United Arab Emirates (UAE, Dubai) are focusing on special economic zones (SEZs) for...

During the last 20 years, R&D and innovation activities in the service sector have clearly increased. Especially business services are believed to be one of the main drivers of technical changes and economic progress. Looking at the labour indices calculated over the period from 1982 to 1996 one...

A wide range of empirical studies has analysed exporter performance, especially the relationship between exports and productivity in the manufacturing sector. By contrast, a detailed investigation of the services sector has remained largely neglected. To close this gap, this paper focuses on the...

The main purpose of this study is to determine what are the main factors which stand behind the diversity in performance of business services measured by their contribution to growth in the EU Member States. We show that in addition to typical growth factors which enhance labour productivity,...