In the current scenario, a large and growing number of policies for local development and cluster upgrading explicitly incorporate the idea of innovation as a systemic process, embedded in specific socio-cultural and institutional contexts and intermingled with international challenges,...

Rankings to evaluate opportunity distributions present in most of the literature judge a policy (change from one distribution of opportunities to another) on the basis of the changes created and, thus, independently of the original situation. This paper proposes a group of axioms capturing the...

Governments in western countries are seeing Universities as the key actor to promote a transition to a knowledge-based economy that can help the future competitiveness challenges posed by new entrants in the global market. In this context, specific industrial policies are designed to promote a...

This paper shows the numerous problems of conventional economic analysis in the evaluation of climate change mitigation policies. The article points out the many limitations, omissions, and the arbitrariness that have characterized most evaluation models applied up until now. These shortcomings,...

The objective of the paper is to focus on the transmission details of macroeconomic adjustment in a crisis-prone economy. The nature of currency crisis is examined in terms of the third generation approach as suggested by Krugman and Kim. According to this approach currency depreciation involves...

This paper is a first attempt to analyse the relationship between spatial agglomeration and firms’ organizational structures. It takes advantage of a large data set on Italian business groups that allowed us to analyse the differences in the presence and characteristics of business groups...

The research in the topic of industrial districts has been focused on the identification of which industries are forming industrial districts and on the causes behind the development of the clusters. As well as there are historical and efficiency reasons that are behind the current configuration...

This article presents an agent-based modelof Prato, an Italian textile district where thousands ofsma1l firms specialise into tiny phases of the whole production process. It is an empirical model atscale 1: 1 that reconstructs the information flows between economic actors and connects them...

A systems analysis perspective is adopted to examine the critical properties of the Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) mode of innovation, as reflected on the SourceForge platform (SF.net). This approach re-scales March's (1991) framework and applies it to characterize the innovation system...