In the US and Europe many clusters initiatives have recently been launched. National and regional governments have been defining and implementing clusters policies and programmes with the aim to identifying, launching and finally consolidating international competitive clusters in their...

Huambo has central capacities able to compete and complement other major towns in Africa such as Johannesburg and Nairobi. Nevertheless, Huambo, the second city of Angola, was at war from 1975 till 2002 and continued to be relatively isolated from 2002 till 2006, because it took some time to...

Economic convergence: a regional and subregional view Manuel Pérez Montiel Gislaine Cristina de Souza Rech Judite Sanson de Bem The study of economic convergence among nations is based on the initial work of Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1991), a topic of spatial econometric analysis Recently,...

In some european areas there are thousands of active companies with quite similar profiles, but the information about the potential for cooperation among the countries in the area is scarce because of the lack of visibility of SME-s, in general, and of transnational connections between companies...

Although migration and religion studies have traditionally developed as separate research topics, in the current context of globalization and transnationalism attention begins to focus on the way they may interconnect. Consequently, recent studies of migration raise the importance and role of...

This paper examines the question of inter-regional spillovers in Fukuoka Prefecture. Fukuoka Prefecture is located on the west side of Japan, and is near the Korean peninsula. There are two government-designated major cities in Fukuoka Prefecture. One is Fukuoka City, which is the central city...

This paper draws on a sample of innovative Catalan firms to identify the effects of the two main sources of innovation —internal R&D and external R&D acquisition— on productivity in the manufacturing and service industries. The sample comprises a 3,267 firms from the CIS-4 for the...

Polycentrism is becoming one of the dominant structures in contemporary metropolises. Concentrated decentralization and the integration of formerly independent cities by the reduction of travel time are behind of such a process. In this paper, the spatial structure of the seven biggest metro...

It is the aim of this work to make a brief reference to the current situation of 'observatories' in Portugal as well as the change of their status, before developed through closed research circuits which included the Administration and Universities; nowadays characterized by the proliferation of...