This article analyses recent efforts to create a different institutional framework in Pará State, Brazilian Amazon to promote sustainable development. The region is economically peripheral to capitalism. Historically, Amazon river delta has been used as source of raw materials since XVII...

The advantages of industrial clusters as propenners of development have been widely noted. These advantages have prompted various administrations to propose the creation of clusters as a development policy. The state of Tamaulipas, Mexico has not been an exception. The purpose of this paper is...

This paper analyses the Apulian mechatronics district, and in particular recent developments during the global economic crisis that began in 2008, as well as the role played by public policies in favouring the birth and endurance of the local production system. Although it is going through a...

The rural inhabitants need to face and survive structural changes in rural economy and, thus, to become more market oriented. Traditions and old skills were somehow lost and new activities were approached. In order to reach them, public policy intervened and supported several types of...

Academic interest in Local Productive Systems (LPS) is on the rise. So are public policies specifically directed to such systems, which may be defined as a territorial agglomeration of interacting economic, social and political actors focused on a specific set of economic activities. Part of...

The Mexican Ethanol Project has the potential of power up rural economy, improve the environment quality, and substitute the non-renewable fossil energy resources. But the risk of not achieving these is latent: the market distorts that it could unleash can change the expected outcomes. Public...

This paper analyzes empirically a public policy promoting industrial clusters in France. Cluster policies have become popular in many countries but have not been extensively evaluated empirically. We use data on production and employment for firms that benefited from the policy and on firms that...

This article reviews the implications for land use policy of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Fifty years after its publication in 1961, Death and Life remains a clarion call for resistance to monolithic development and to the reigning paradigm of urban planning in the...

This paper critically examines the role of trust and government agency in the creation of artificial industrial districts by means of 'instructing' clusters of companies in specific geographic areas to form entrepreneurial networks in order to obtain a public subsidy. The paper is based on a...

We address a practical problem often faced by economic development organizations using data from the Greater Pittsburgh area. Local economic development organizations are often tasked with promoting the health and vitality of the regional economy. However, the unique composition of each...