This contribution analyzes the impact of intangible capital on labor productivity growth across countries at the aggregate and sectoral levels by employing an econometric growth-accounting approach. First, our results show that intangible capital deepening accounts for around 50 percent of labor...

Over the last two decades EU countries experienced diverging productivity growthdevelopments. By examining the sources of EU countries growth drivers on the sectorallevel, the paper takes a new look on the influence of innovations. While standard neoclassicalNon-ICT capital deepening turns out...

The article draws on the concepts of cultural and political embeddedness to analyse the local embeddedness of a global transnational engineering firm in transforming economies. It compares the process of the negotiations for and the acquisitions of assets undertaken by ABB in Wroclaw, Poland and...

This paper describes the industrial development of Europe to 1600. The conventional history of industrial development sees technological progress as its primary cause. However, this paper argues that the source of rising productivity was not new technology but the reorganization of production in...

In a model with robots, and automatable and complementary human tasks, we examine robot-labour substitutions and show how it they are influenced by a country's "innovation system". Substitution depends on demand and production elasticities, and other factors influenced by the innovation system....

The water-mill, though known in the Roman Empire from the second century BCE, did not come to enjoy any widespread use until the 4th or 5th centuries CE, and then chiefly in the West, which was then experiencing not only a rapid decline in the supply of slaves, but also widespread depopulation,...

Is the rapid growth of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) activities shaping new local specialization and industrial concentration? Does the analysis of local economic conditions help to explain the formation of “places” specialized in ICT? We use 2001 Census data by Local...

This paper observes that de-industrialisation has been mostly relative in Europe, with industrial value added and employment shrinking in relative terms, but industrial value added growing in absolute terms – at least until recently. Qualitatively, this relative de-industrialisation has been...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and to what extent European manufacturing location has been driven by regional localisation or national comparative advantages during the period 1985-2001. To this end, the relative concentration pattern of each industry is disentangled into...

The main objective of this paper is to assess the role of a large set of factors which potentially relate agglomeration economies to local growth. Such a relationship is analysed thanks to an ample database on the case of Italy which refers to 784 Local Labour Systems and 34 sectors (21...