The volume begins with an Introduction, followed by a set of three papers in Part Two examining European urban competitiveness from the standpoints of measurement and policy. This section also provides a case study of the cities of one country – Italy – from which the reader can...

La figura dell’uomo artigiano ha ricevuto negli ultimi anni una crescente attenzione da parte della ricerca socioeconomica internazionale. In questa nuova prospettiva di analisi, il saggio si propone di esaminare il suo effettivo contributo economico rispetto alla competitività dei settori...

Il lavoro artigiano ha conosciuto, nel corso degli ultimi anni, una riscoperta a livello internazionale. Un’analisi superficiale del fenomeno rischia di rilanciare una figura di artigiano contrapposta alle logiche della produzione industriale. Una lettura più attenta, invece, consente di...

Manufacturing industries in developed countries have been experiencing profound changes over the last decade. Production of inputs and commodity goods has been increasingly outsourced to emerging countries’ low-wage suppliers, thus nurturing an unprecedented process of ‘global shifts’....

The study of the determinants of innovation processes has received great attention in both the economics and the business literature. However, only few contributions have proposed a comprehensive framework able to bring together different but not mutually exclusive research approaches. This...

This paper uses a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms over the period 2004–06, to investigate whether different types of agglomeration economies affect firms’ internationalisation choices. The main novelty of the work consists in linking the hypothesis of firm heterogeneity to the...