| Popis: |
During recent decades, the process of convergence among European regions has slowed down considerably and according to a widening group of economists (Fagerberg and Verspagen 1996; Tondl 1997; Beine and Philippe 2000) it even ceased after 1980. However, important growth differentials still characterize the European landscape. This fact implies that some major assumptions underlying the neoclassical view of regional economic growth, such as constant returns to scale, perfect mobility of factors and immediate diffusion of knowledge may fail to match reality. At the other extreme, perfect immobility of knowledge as advocated by the circular and cumulative causation assumption (Myrdal 1957; Kaldor 1966), where regions build up their own technological capabilities and move along their own balanced growth path, can not reasonably be defended when one looks at the growing evidence for geographically and technologically mediated spillovers (Jaffe et al. 1993; Jaffe and Trajtenberg 1996; Maurseth and Verspagen 1999; Varga 1998; Caniels 2000). |
