This Briefing Note considers recent trends in specialisation, outsourcing and offshoring of business services. Specialisation within a firm happens when a firm organises an activity in a specialised unit, for example, when a firm moves payroll activities out of the back office of a factory, and...

Stronger productivity growth in the US than the EU over the late 1990s is widely attributed to faster, more widespread adoption of information and communication technology (ICT). The literature has emphasised complementarities in production between ICT and internal restructuring as an important...

We investigate evidence for spatially mediated knowledge transfer from university research. We examine whether firms locate their R&D labs near universities, and whether those that do are more likely to co-operate with, or source knowledge from universities. We find that pharmaceutical firms...