This paper presents a critical assessment of the widely discussed concept of Islamic Economics. The two different interpretations of Islamic economics as the study of the functioning of an interest-free economy and the validity of moral values in the economy are discussed. It is shown that none...

Recent theoretical advances in consumption theory suggest that there may exist predictable consumption surges which, if not taken sufficiently into account in forecasting, may lead to predictable forecast errors. We use this insight to identify economic variables that might help improve the...

Williamson (1965) argued that catching up countries experiencing strong national growth tend also to see a widening in regional disparities, whereas in more developed economies strong national growth and falling regional disparities could go hand in hand. We find some evidence of a trade-off...

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the issue of income convergence has received considerable attention in economic research. Although a vast number of empirical studies has emerged, evidence on the role of spatial interaction is still rather scarce. The present paper is an attempt to provide...

This paper provides a new attempt to examine the relationship between an economy's exposure to foreign trade and its degree of urban concentration. In contrast to previous work, which is often based on rich cross-country data sets, the analysis is focused exclusively on European countries,...

This paper empirically assesses the impact of specialisation on the synchronisation of regional business cycles in two core countries of EMU, namely France and Germany. Several specialisation indices are introduced and some first stylised facts about interregional business cycle correlations are...

Border regions and border effects currently attract a lot of attention in political practice and economic research. Substantial interest in regions located along the frontiers of integrating countries is predominantly inspired by the presumption that their specific geographic position might...

The present paper examines the economic development perspectives of the manufacturing sector of 31 major West German regions in the process of globalisation. Public statistics do not provide FDI data on a regional basis. Therefore our study was based on indicators based on the data from the...

We estimate the speed of income convergence for a sample of 196 European NUTS 2 regions over the period 1985-1999. So far there is no direct estimator available for dynamic panels with strong spatial dependencies. We propose a two-step procedure, which involves first spatial filtering of the...

Using entropy indices and associated bootstrap tests, we describe the distribution of economic sectors across Western European regions over the 1975-2000 period. We decompose geographic concentration into its within-country and between-country components. In addition, we estimate...