Contemporary economic analysis is largely subject to rather bizarre schizofrenic syndromes. On the one hand, over the last thirty years or so, macro theories have tried to squeeze the interpretation of whatever aggregate dynamics down to some sort of decision-theoretic framework in which the...

Italy’s manufacturing performance in the last decade was the worst of all the other major OECD countries. The study investigates the micro-dynamics underlying the aggregate trend. While labor productivity in most manufacturing sectors has remained almost flat, distribution support has widened....

In the 1990s, development policy advocated by international financial institutions was influenced by Washington Consensus thinking. This strategy, based largely on liberalization, privatization, and price-flexibility, downplayed, if not disregarded, the role of government in steering the...

This book brings together the work of leading international thinkers working in the overlapping areas of economics, organization studies, business history, corporate strategy, and innovation. There is a growing awareness that the perspectives of a single discipline are unable to capture and...

Diverse theories of industry dynamics predict heterogeneity in production efficiency to be the driver of firms' growth, survival and industrial change, either through a direct link between efficiency and growth, or through an indirect effect via profitabilities, as more productive firms can...

This work is an attempt, first, to outline the basic building blocks of evolutionary theory in economics and, second, to offer a comparative assessment of different strands of literature which call upon evolutionary ideas of some sort. We sketch out what we consider to be the main results...

Empirically the diffusion of competing technologies most often displays either "lock-in" to a quasi-monopoly or apparent turbulence but rarely stable market-sharing. In contrast with widespread views, we show that, first, unbounded increasing returns are neither necessary nor sufficient to lead...

Diverse theories of industry dynamics predict heterogeneity in production efficiency to be the driver of firms' growth, survival and industrial change, either through a direct link between efficiency and growth, or through an indirect effect via profitabilities, as more productive firms can...