This paper argues that economic competition and political contestability are two key determinants of the successful development of the Swiss economy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We describe how Switzerland evolved from a relatively poor country with no natural resources and net...

Hochkarätige Wissenschaftler, Politiker und Topexperten wie Joseph Stiglitz, Jean-Claude Trichet und der Dalai Lama vereinen ihre Thesen zum Thema "Nachhaltiges Wirtschaftswachstum" und gehen dabei auch auf die spezielle deutsche Situation ein. Sie zeigen: Wachstum birgt viele Chancen.

Despite the strong pace of globalization, the distance effect on trade is persistent or even growing over time (Disdier and Head, 2008). To solve this distance puzzle, we use the recently developed gravity equation estimator from Helpman, Melitz and Rubinstein (2008), HMR henceforth. Using three...

Recent contributions on offshoring often assume that firms can freely split their production process into separate steps which can be ranked according to the cost savings from producing abroad. We replace this assumption by the notion of a technologically determined sequence of production steps....