Local strategic networks and policies in European ICT clusters - the cases of Amsterdam, Bari, Dublin and Oulu

Regional interfirm networks are believed to be a vehicle for innovation and regional economic growth. From this perspective, local and regional governments are increasingly trying to promote these types of networks. This article discusses the relation between strategic networks and local development. It focuses on the role of local institutions that support strategic networking in ICT clusters in a number of European cities. It also discusses and analyses the way local and national governments try to influence local strategic networks in this sector. Our case studies are Amsterdam, Bari, Dublin, and Oulu.strategic networks policies ICT cluster casestudy Amsterdam Bari Dublin Oulu

Global Production Networks and the Changing Geography of Innovation Systems: Implications for Developing Countries

The paper addresses disruptive changes that globalization imposes on the geography of innovation systems, and identifies potential benefits that developing countries could reap from international linkages. The analysis is centered on three propositions. First, developing countries nee to blend diverse international and domestic sources of knowledge to compensate for initially weak national production and innovation systems. Second, a greater variety of international knowledge linkages are possible, as globalization reduces the spatial stickiness of innovation: the spread of global production networks (GPN) combines concentrated dispersion with systemic integration, creating new opportunities for international diffusion. We argue that GPN provide firms and industrial districts in developing countries with new opportunities for reverse knowledge outsourcing. We explore resultant challenges that define the need for public policy response, define the new agenda for industrial upgrading, and discuss what types of policies and support institutions may help to reap the benefits from network participation.

Technoligical Life Cycles Regional Clusters Facing Disruption

The phenomenon of technological life cycles is argued to be of great importance in the development of regional clusters. New 'disruptive' technologies may initiate the emergence of new regional industrial clusters and/or create new opportunities for further development of existing ones. However, they may also result in stagnation and decline of the latter. The term disruptive refers to such significant changes in the basic technologies that may change the industrial landscape, even in the shorter run. The paper examines the key features of a regional cluster, where the economic development patterns are quite closely related to the emergence of new key technologies.Technological life cycles, regional clusters, communication technology

Corporations and Economic Inequality Around the World: The Paradox of Hierarchy

Using time-series data from the US since 1950 and from 53 countries around the world in 2006, this chapter documents a strong negative relation between an economy’s employment concentration (that is, the proportion of the labor force employed by the largest 10, 25, or 50 firms) and its level of income inequality. Within the US, we find that trends in the relative size of the largest employers (up in the 1960s and 1970s, down in the 1980s and 1990s, up in the 2000s) are directly linked to changes in inequality, and that corporate size is a proximal cause of the extravagant increase in social inequality over the past generation. We conclude that organization theory can provide a distinctive contribution to understanding societal outcomes

European Eastern Enlargement as Europe's Attempted Economic Suicide?

We argue that the process of European economic integration has made a qualitative shift: from a Listian symmetrical economic integration to an integrative and asymmetrical integration. This shift started in the early 1990s with the integration of the former Soviet economies into the economies of Europe and the world as a whole, reached its climax with the Eastern enlargement of the Union in 2004, and now forms the foundation of the renewed Lisbon Strategy. This change is measurably threatening European welfare: the economic periphery in the first instance, and potentially the core countries as well. Two parallel processes aggravate this development: the timing of the enlargement at this particular phase of the evolving techno-economic paradigm; and the creation of the European Monetary Union along the so-called Maastricht route towards convergence and fiscal stability.

Liabilities of Regional Foreignness and the Use of Firm Level and Country Level Data

We are pleased that Dunning et al. (2006) have provided macro (country) level data demonstrating the increased internationalization of many nations over the past decade. We also appreciate their findings lending support to our perspective on the regional nature of world business. Our work was based solely on micro (firm) level data, see Rugman and Verbeke (2004a). Both country level data and firm level data have methodological problems which we attempt to reconcile in this comment. We also address the broader conceptual issues of how to interpret country level versus firm level data.Regional strategy, home region bound firm-specific advantages, liability of regional foreignness, methodology

Exploring the links between HIV/AIDS, social capital, and development

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on social capital with cross-country data. Using data from the World Values Survey, the authors estimate reduced-form regressions of the main determinants of social capital controlling for HIV prevalence, institutional quality, social distance, and economic indicators. The results obtained indicate that HIV prevalence affects social capital negatively. The empirical estimates suggest that a one standard deviation increase in HIV prevalence will lead to a decline of at least 1 percent in trust, controlling for other determinants of social capital. Moving from a country with a relatively low level of HIV prevalence, such as Estonia, to a country with a relatively high level, such as Uganda, there is a more than 11 percentpoint decline in social capital. These results are robust in a number of dimensions and highlight the empirical importance of an additional mechanism through which HIV/AIDS hinders the development process.Population Policies,Social Capital,HIV AIDS,Disease Control&Prevention,Inequality

Development of stock markets, societal norms and legal institutions

We explain the development of stock markets by both legal and societal determinants and analyze the relevance of both determinants in the Levine-Zervos (1998) cross-sectional growth regressions. We argue that the legal indicators as developed by La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny (1998) are not covering all the aspects of alternatives to financial contracting as suggested by Levine (2000). The basic argument is that the legal classification of countries does not completely cover the cross-country variation in the societal desire to use contracting in financial transactions. After establishing the determinants of stock market development we analyze the impact of stock market development on economic growth. We use a 2SLS approach to correct for the endogeneity of stock market development. We contradict the positive view of Levine-Zervos on the impact of liquidity of stock markets on economic growth. Our conclusions are in line with Levine (2000) who argues that it is not financial structure but the development of the deep structural legal and societal characteristics that is instrumental to economic growth.