In the emerging globalised knowledge society/economy, a group of professionals, namely experts and consultants gain in importance. The paper discusses the following issues: Who are these experts and consultants? Why is this group of knowledge workers strategically important and why is their...

In this paper, we assess the effect of globalization on the distribution of income within countries, focussing on the influence of foreign direct investment. We analyze data for 72 countries, 1970-90. We incorporate in our tests the Kuznets (1955) curve, measures of the character of political...

It is often the case that national policies are not necessarily suitable at lower administrative levels due to the spatial complexity of natural and socio-economic resources within a country. That complexity of resources can be resolved by spatial modeling of natural and socio-economic...

This paper analyses the connection between resource wealth, governance and economic performance in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Since independence, both countries have remained heavily resource-dependent and they have had political stability, but despite some similarities, their economic...

Failure to accumulate human capital is one of the pressing problems of developing countries. Lacking human capital formation bears consequences on an economy wide level, since education contributes to labor productivity. We examine the impact of increased school enrollment with regard to...

The United Nation's Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) pick up where the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) left off. The SDGs set forth a formidable task for the global community and international sustainable development over the next 15 years. Learning from the successes and...

This paper presents a simple framework in which the location and the growth rate of economic activities are endogenous and interact. We show that the nature of the equilibrium and of the relation between growth and location depends fundamentally on whether capital is assumed to be mobile (in...

The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that emphasize the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

This paper discusses a large-scale factor model for the German economy. Following the recent literature, a data set of 121 time series is used via principal component analysis to determine the factors, which enter a dynamic model for German GDP. The model is compared with alternative univariate...

This is a study of 42 developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America in which we first examine the impact of trade liberalisation on economic growth, investment share of GDP, openness, trade balance and current accounts (as percentages of GDP). Both panel data and country by country data...