The business services sector has moved into the focus of economic policy attention on account of its comparatively high growth rates of recent years in terms of both value added and employment. The employment potential of the sector is assumed to be considerable.

In a cross-section where the initial distribution of observations differs from the steady-state distribution and initial values matter, convergence is best measured in terms of "σ"-convergence over a fixed time period. For this setting, we propose a new simple Wald test for conditional...

A detailed examination of the determinants of industry growth is of particular relevance to industrial policy. This article uses a comprehensive panel approach to analyse the growth process of manufacturing industries in the EU countries over the period 1985-1997. Following a review theoretical...

This article deals with the importance of corporate citizenship for the attractiveness of a modern, competitive location of business activities. Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that within internationally active business firms, departments with high value-added and departments with...

This paper computes (marginal and average) forward-looking effective tax rates for a sample of more than 550,000 firms in and outside of Europe using Bureau van Dijk's ORBIS data-base. Comparing the firm-level effective tax rates with their country-level counterparts we arrive at two important...

This paper computes effective (marginal and average) tax rates that account for bilateral aspects of taxation and, therefore, vary across country-pairs and years. These tax rates serve to estimate the impact of corporate taxation on outbound stocks of bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI)...

Empirical work on regional growth under spatial spillovers uses two workhorse models: the spatial Solow model and Verdoorn's model. This paper contrasts these two views on regional growth processes and demonstrates that in both models the speed of convergence also depends on the remoteness and...

This paper assesses the impact of corporate taxation on multinational activity. A numerically solvable general equilibrium model of trade and multinational firms is used to incorporate the following components of corporate taxation: parent and host country statutory corporate tax rates,...

We find fast convergence in productivity for 99 three-digit European industries over the 1985-98 period. Half of any productivity gap is closed on average in about 10-15 years. We explicitly formulate the steady-state assumptions for structural convergence to hold. Convergence in industrial...