In recent years, Intellectual Property Rights - both in the form of patents and copyrights - have expanded in their coverage, the breadth and depth of protection, and the tightness of their enforcement. Moreover, for the first time in history, the IPR regime has become increasingly uniform at...

This paper investigates the firm-level dynamics of labour productivity in China's manufacturing sector over the period 1998-2007. Underlying the aggregate evidence of a dramatic growth of labour productivity, one observes a large, even if shrinking, intra-sectoral heterogeneity. A major process...

The economic theory of intellectual property rights is based on a rather narrow view of both competition and technological knowledge. We suggest some ways of enriching this framework with a more empirically grounded view of both and, by means of a simulation model, we analyse the impact of...

Italy’s manufacturing performance in the last decade was the worst of all the other major OECD countries. The study investigates the micro-dynamics underlying the aggregate trend. While labor productivity in most manufacturing sectors has remained almost flat, distribution support has widened....

In the 1990s, development policy advocated by international financial institutions was influenced by Washington Consensus thinking. This strategy, based largely on liberalization, privatization, and price-flexibility, downplayed, if not disregarded, the role of government in steering the...

This book brings together the work of leading international thinkers working in the overlapping areas of economics, organization studies, business history, corporate strategy, and innovation. There is a growing awareness that the perspectives of a single discipline are unable to capture and...

Diverse theories of industry dynamics predict heterogeneity in production efficiency to be the driver of firms' growth, survival and industrial change, either through a direct link between efficiency and growth, or through an indirect effect via profitabilities, as more productive firms can...

This work is an attempt, first, to outline the basic building blocks of evolutionary theory in economics and, second, to offer a comparative assessment of different strands of literature which call upon evolutionary ideas of some sort. We sketch out what we consider to be the main results...