regions

This paper argues that the rate of regional growth of new nanotech knowledge is positively affected by the existing regional stocks of recorded knowledge, and by tacit knowledge flows between institutions of different organizational types.

The authors undertake a direct evaluation of a fiscal incentive policy in Brazil, the Fundos Constitucionais de Financiamento (Constitutional Funds). Findings indicate that the pull of firm headquarters is very strong relative to the constitutional funds for vertically integrated firms, but that, with nonparametric controls for time invariant spatial heterogeneity, the funds provide significant incentives for firms in many of the targeted industries.

This paper addresses the final steps to global free trade -- the political economy forces that might drive them, and the role the WTO might play in guiding them. It suggests three things the WTO could do to help multilateralise regionalism.

This paper investigates the impact of learning-by-
producing on inventive activity and shows that, in both
emerging and maturing industries, the geographic association between invention and production was rather weak during the Second Industrial Revolution. The findings suggest that scholars have over--emphasized the importance of learning-by-producing in accounting for the geographic differences in inventive activity, and underestimated the significance of technical skills or human capital amongst the population.

This paper approaches the properties of the footloose entrepreneur class of new economic geography models with a unifying framework based on the indirect utility function of mobile agents. This framework allows the authors to show how specific results in the literature can be reconciled as special cases, thereby allowing them to highlight the origin of their differences.

This paper investigates the effects of new business formation on employment change in German regions. The different phases of the effects of new business formation on regional development are relatively pronounced in agglomerations as well as in regions with a high-level of labor productivity. In low-productivity regions, the overall employment effect of new business formation activity might be negative. The interregional differences indicate that regional factors play an important role.

To explain cross-country income differences, research has recently focused on the so-called deep determinants of economic development, notably institutions and geography. This paper uses spatial econometrics to analyse the importance of the geography of institutions. The authors show that it is not only absolute geography, in terms of for instance climate, but also relative geography, the spatial linkages between countries, that matters for a country’s gdp per capita. Apart from a country’s own institutions, institutions in neighboring countries turn out to be relevant as well.