China's rapid economic growth in recent decades has not led to balanced income distribution: inter- and intra-provincial income inequality have been increasing and their respective contribution to the total income inequality remains relatively stable. Based on a new set of prefectural database...

The paper Investigates stability and change of regional economic activities in the long-run. As the unit of analysis we selected the machine tool industry in West Germany for the years 1953 to 2002. We spot a strong variance in the activities between the different regions. These differences are...

Theoretical approaches have been developed to examine the effect of agglomeration on growth. However, the understanding of the mechanisms of agglomeration in developing countries remains unaddressed. This paper aims to give empirical evidence of the role of agglomeration on the growth of Latin...

This paper investigates whether localization economies as brought forward by Marshall(1890) or urbanization economies as mentioned by Jacobs (1970) are more decisive forregional gross value added per capita. Our novel approach is to explicitly allow forinterdependencies between these two...

We use U.S. county-level data to estimate convergence rates for 22 individual states. We find significant heterogeneity. E.g., the California estimate is 19.9 percent and the New York estimate is 3.3 percent. Convergence rates are essentially uncorrelated with income levels.

We use US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively...

This paper investigates whether localization economies as brought forward by Marshall (1890) or urbanization economies as mentioned by Jacobs (1970) are more decisive for regional gross value added per capita. Our novel approach is to explicitly allow for interdependencies between these two...

The report analyses the fiscal and macroeconomic environment in the lagging regions and the relevant Member States of the EU, as a sound and sustainable macroeconomic framework is a necessary, but by itself not a sufficient precondition for investment and growth in the regions. It starts with...

This report is an annex to wiiw Research Report 421, 'Economic Challenges of Lagging Regions I Fiscal and Macroeconomic Environment'. It provides eight detailed country case studies, analysing the fiscal and macroeconomic environment in Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania...

In this paper, we outline (i) why σ-convergence may not accompany β-convergence, (ii) discuss evidence of β-convergence in the United States, and (iii) use U.S. county-level data containing over 3,000 cross-sectional observations to demonstrate that σ-convergence cannot be detected at the...