Measuring regional creative capacity: A literature review for rural-specific approaches

Recent theories on regional creative capacity often focus on urban regions without taking into account rural regions. In addition, the application of such analyses to rural regions may lead to misrepresentation or misunderstanding of rural creative capacity. Against this background, the aim of the present study is to integrate the existing literature on different components of creative capacity, namely, knowledge, innovation, entrepreneurship and networks, in order to build a more comprehensive framework for rural creative capacity and its evaluation. In the light of the perspective from the empirical literature review on the evaluation of creative capacity in rural regions, various empirical measurements seem to misrepresent or underestimate the creative capacity of rural regions. Therefore, there is a clear need to use the locality in relation to its dynamics, i.e. tacit knowledge, cultural heritage and social and physical environment as the main and basic measurement unit for creative capacity analysis. 2010 Taylor & Francis

A note on labour productivity and foreign inward direct investment

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is not only a transfer of capital, but a complex bundle of capital and firm-specific assets. In particular, the transfer of production know-how improves overall productivity of FDI-receiving firms and to some extent also that of the other firms due to spillovers. The present note uses a small panel of Austrian manufacturing sectors and investigates this hypothesis empirically. In a flexible CES-framework, general and labour-augmenting productivity improving effects of inward FDI are found. Thus, the job creation potential of FDI highlighted in previous studies is likely to be overestimated.

Biased FDI spillovers in incomplete datasets: An empirical examination

We examine biases in foreign direct investment (FDI) productivity spillovers that can arise when using incomplete datasets, by comparing estimates for Indonesia from the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES)—an incomplete dataset example—with estimates from the Indonesian Manufacturing Survey (MS). Furthermore, we conduct estimations on samples drawn from MS, following the sampling methodology of WBES. We find that estimates with this sampling framework are inaccurate, due to measurement error in industry-level horizontal and vertical FDI, strong presence of small firms, and small sample size. Relaxing the WBES sampling criteria and using FDI variables from MS produces substantially more reliable findings