The present paper is a brief introduction into the new challenges posed to language competencies from the perspective of information and communication technologies and of the knowledge society. It emphasises the importance of a common yet multilingual world wide web with shared understanding of...

The aim of this paper is to add new findings to the knowledge based view of the firm, where the cross-learning ability of individuals and organizations plays a fundamental role in the determination of firms' superior performances. Collective, non formal - informal, formal types of learning...

Neoclassical economists posit a set of stylized facts which mark the structural transformation of national economies. Yet these facts, when disaggregated by gender, exhibit puzzling anomalies. For the 132 countries in our sample, female rates of economic activity are much lower than men's, and...

With the growing importance of knowledge, new research questions arise that require more explicit analyses of the way human capital is produced and how it is used in the labour market. In this introduction to this special issue we provide examples of such questions and argue that economics can...

Using a human capital theory framework, this study examines the impact of educational mismatches on earnings and occupational mobility. Occupational mobility theory suggests that overeducated workers observe greater upward occupational mobility and undereducated workers observe lower upward...

This paper examines aspects of R&D spillovers across countries, in particular, the role of international trade and human capital as the catalysts for international diffusion of technology. We present a new way of measuring foreign R&D stocks embodied in foreign intermediate goods and capital...

This paper analyses the determinants of economic growth for a sample of 95 countries in the 1960-1998 period. The hypothesis is that such determinants change among countries with different degree of development. In fact, we found that the results for the global sample agree with previous fi...

There are two phenomena widely observed when an economy departs from an underdeveloped state and starts rapid economic growth. One is the shift of production, employment, and consumption from the traditional sector to the modern sector, and the other is a large increase in educational levels of...