Elementary economics textbooks have become less attractive to students requiring only an introduction to economics, given that their content is pervaded by mathematical diagrams and simple equations. Also they are of relatively little value to those interested in, for example, attempting to gain...

Schumpeterian growth models revolve around two tacit assumptions that are at odds with the empirical evidence, namely: all innovations are equally important for economic growth (equipollent innovation) and all innovations occur in one sector only (confined innovation). The present paper shows...

This paper is an attempt to tease out a typology of economic sectors based on a systems approach to innovation and economic growth that may be useful for policy analysis. The typology explored here revolves around novel products rather than ethereal knowledge-producing entities. This insight...

Modern growth theory acknowledges that a country's economic prosperity depends in large part on its capacity for technological innovation. Empirical evidence, however, supports the view that not all sectors are equally innovative. As a result, it seems desirable from a public policy perspective...

Although scholars and policy makers have widely acknowledged the importance of so-called high-technology industries as drivers of economic change, they have paid insufficient attention to the interaction between high-tech sectors and the remainder of the economy in developed countries. We...

This paper views the housing and credit bubble 2001-2008 in a stylized manner, namely as a sequence starting with a financial innovation in 2001 followed by the superimposition of other financial innovations leading to the prevalence of uncertainty in Knight’s sense and ending in the last...

One of the striking features of our society is the incessant urge for the creation, adoption and diffusion of innovations. Innovation takes many forms: technological, organizational, social, artistic, for example. The term ‘social innovation’ has come into common parlance in recent years....

In the earlier years of the twentieth century economists were beginning to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the economic change. Joseph Alois Schumpeter, for example, argued that the first key step in understanding economic change is to think carefully about innovation. When Kuznets...

The process of economic integration has made considerable progress during the 1990s in the European Union (EU). Firstly, with the establishment of a single market in 1993 and now, within a relatively short period of time, the most significant yet, the movement towards a single currency for...

Recent research has sought to explore whether exporting enterprises have superior performance characteristics relative to non-exporters, and whether such superiority is associated with performance pre- and/or post- exporting. This paper extends existing research by examining the influence of...