This paper describes developmental pathways of two regions in Central and Eastern Europe: Leipzig (Germany) and Petrosani (Romania). Once being strongholds of traditional industries, these regions have developed along distinctive socio-economic trajectories over the last two decades. While...

Lots of studies were produced in the past decade on the importance of the quality of the institutions for economic development. Several authors focused on the indicators provided by Doing Business (World Bank) to highlight the main factors favouring or rather limiting the economic development....

This document, intended to be discuss and criticized, aims for the implementation on the city of Barreiro, Portugal, of a Local Investment Agency. The final objective of such project is to allow entrepreneurs and investors to build in the city new ventures that can create employment, build an...

From the standpoint of policies, the different branches of economics may be aggregated into two categories: dirigiste and laissez fairist. Dirigiste theories in economics have been based primarily on the complexity of commodities: this allows commodities to be ranked according to the...

The objective of this paper is to develop a more comprehensive understanding, from a policy perspective, of key drivers of labour productivity in selected OECD countries and their impact on enhanced productivity performance. The paper first presents some general lessons from the productivity...

Culture, as a key driver of innovative activity, has been largely analysed at the national and organisational levels by interdisciplinary studies. This article investigates the relationship between Schwartz's cultural dimensions and innovation, proxied by the number of patent applications to the...

Eine neue, umfassende Untersuchung des ifo Instituts Dresden analysiert mit theoretisch fundierten Indikatoren und mit einer Investorenbefragung die Standortbedingungen in Sachsen, Polen und Tschechien. Auf der Basis der Aussagen der Außenhandels- und Integrationstheorie werden hieraus...

Using a unique census dataset on all industrial firms (with more than 5 million yuan in sales), we document a phenomenon of missing entrepreneurship in Shanghai. Entrepreneurship is defined as private, new entrants in our paper. Specifically, in terms of business density, the size of employment...

This paper provides the first empirical test of the role of history versus expectations in U.S. urban development. Starting from Paul Krugman's theoretical work in new economic geography, we test whether or not a modern city develops because of either advantageous initial conditions or by way of...