Wetlands are among the most important natural resources on earth, as sources of biological, cultural and economic diversity. Conservation and management of wetlands have been identified as priority tasks for action in international conventions and regional policies, but extensive wetland area...

Regions vary strongly according to the participation of firms in R&Dactivity.By linking data on R&D activity at thefirm level with GIS based data on economic, and other locationfeatures of zoneswe are able to investigate the impactof local factors on R&D involvement for various types of...

Substantial differences exist among fuel taxes in various countries. Thesedifferences represent a form of fiscal competition that has undesirable side effects because it leads to cross-borderfuelling and hence to extra kilometres driven.One possible way of solving the problem of low fuel taxes...

Contemporary migration studies witness an increasing interest in the socio-economicrole of networks of migrants. Such networks are sometimes even regarded as the mostimportant attraction and location factors for migration, and may even exceed purelyeconomic factors like unemployment and wage...

Unemployment rates appear to vary widely at a subregional (e.g., local or provincial) level. Using spatial econometric models for spatial autocorrelation, this paper focuses attention on the spatial structure of regional unemployment disparities of Italian provinces. On the basis of findings...

The rural-urban gap in infant mortality rates is explained using a new decomposition method that permits identification of the ontribution of unobserved heterogeneity at the household and the community level. Using Demographic and Health Survey data for six Francophone countries in Western...

Finding proper policy instruments to promote productivity growth features prominently on the Lisbon agenda and is central in many national as well as European policy debates. In view of the increased mobility of high-skilled workers in Europe, ongoing globalization and increased interregional...

Empirical studies in spatial economics have shown that agglomeration economies may be a source of the uneven distribution of economic activities and economic growth across cities and regions. Both localization and urbanization economies are hypothesized to foster agglomeration and growth, but...

This paper seeks to establish the factors related to the Human Development Index, incorporating the spatial dimension in the analysis of its determinants. The variables were classified into four groups: geographic, socio-economic, demographic and infrastructure and services. The results show...

The paper investigates the changes in job creation and destruction flows considering a very disaggregate level of analysis. If institutional setup plays a more important role compared to other factors, than at lower levels of aggregation we should observe that job flows regularities are in line...