Distribution of fiscal income among municipalities – which are constitutionally federal official entities in Brazil - is highly unequal. Given conurbation processes and intense urbanization in the second half of the past century, some municipalities concentrate resources and quality public...

Brazil has constitutionally adopted a Unified Health System (SUS) since 1988. SUS is designed so that central government, states and municipalities together offer public, free for all full health coverage. The complexity and territorial arrangement of SUS have been developed in such a way that...

This quick essay aims to demonstrate the fundamental importance of the cost of producing and managing urban space from a developing country perspective. It also indicates, based upon vast literature, that the price of urban investments end up to have an expelling trend to citizens away from the...

Business-to-consumer (b2c) e-commerce can be regarded as a disruptive process innovation that can make existing business models obsolete. B2c e-commerce provides retailers the possibility of a new service concept, new client interface and even delivery system. The history of retailing is replete...

How can cities and metropolitan regions remain prosperous and competitive in a rapidly changing economy? In our paper we argue that ‘the knowledge economy’ offers perspectives for growth and added value creation. The paper clarifies what elements the knowledge economy actually consists of,...

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has had an undeniable impact on our society. Some people argue that technology has projected us onto a new wave of social and cultural change. Nevertheless, despite the growth of technology and the social significance of its applications, we have...

We explain employment growth in 40 Dutch regions for the period 1996-2002. Our main interest is to test the effect of sectoral variety using data on five-digit sector employment, while controlling for traditional variables. Our measure of variety is entropy, as this measure allows for...

This paper addresses consequences of increased labour migration in Europe due to productivity effects in a core-periphery model. Traditional trade and growth models predict an overall beneficial impact of the accession of the current candidate states to the European Union. However, models...

The present paper presents a geosimulation agent-based model of firm development that is based on firms’ behavioural rules. The model describes growth, closure, spin-offs and relocation of firms in 21 industrial sectors in the Netherlands, based on a dataset of all individual firms in...

Regional economies are continuously evolving shifting from more traditional manufacturing toward more service-oriented production systems. Despite the increasing relevance of services, however, the analysis of innovation at the regional aggregate level has mainly focused on manufacturing,...