Der anhaltende Produktivitätsvorsprung der USA sowie die zunehmende Konkurrenz aus den Schwellenländern führen in Europa seit Mitte der 1990er-Jahre zu einer intensiven Auseinandersetzung mit Fragen der Wettbewerbsfähigkeit. Höhepunkt ist der jüngste Appell der Europäischen Kommission zur...

Statistical cluster techniques are applied in the development of two new taxonomies of manufacturing industries. The first focuses on the distinction between exogenous, location dependent comparative cost advantages, such as the relative abundance of capital or labour, and endogenously created...

This paper aims at establishing the existence of systematic differences in the nature of competitive strategies available to individual firms across industries. By means of qualitative content analysis, we extracted a matrix of 76 industries times 12 strategies reported as being characteristic...

The rise of the service economy has been the predominant pattern of structural change in the twentieth century. This article investigates the driving forces behind the recent stages of this development. Focusing on international input - output data from the early 1970s to the 1990s, a...

Schumpeterian development is characterised by the simultaneous interplay of growth and qualitative transformations of the economic system. At the sectoral level, such qualitative transformations become manifest as variations in the sectoral composition of production. Following the implementation...

Much emphasis on the sectoral perspective in economics originates in the observation of the diverse and contingent nature of competitive behaviour, where a firm's performance depends on the capability to match its organisation and strategy to the technological, social and economic restrictions...

This paper reviews the major finance-related causes of private under-investment in innovation and the consequent alternative choices for public policy. The focus is on incentive-based arguments that address the problem of limited appropriability of new knowledge, and on the lacking access to...

Entrepreneurship has been characterised as one of the most intriguing but equally elusive concepts in economics. This critical review first surveys its major intellectual roots and then proposes a modular concept of entrepreneurship that preserves its essentially distinctive behavioural,...

This paper presents an integrated set of innovation taxonomies for firms and sectors. It discards the practice of representing industries by some average behaviour, instead characterising them by the distribution of diverse innovation modes at the firm level. The theoretical focus is on (i)...