In the past Portugal managed to grow at a significant rate, but the pace has getting slower and slower from decade to decade, until becoming practically stagnant in the first decade of the 21st century. This stumpy growth together with the current debt crisis has fed the rhetoric of structural...

After a period of convergence where many perceived the country as a success case, Portugal’s economic performance proved to be disappointing in the last decade. In this study we focus on the relationship between technology and economic catching-up in order to answer to two major questions: (i)...

The purpose of this paper is to explain differences in the productivity of capital across countries taking 84 rich and poor countries over the period 1980-2011, and to test the orthodox neoclassical assumption of diminishing returns to capital. The marginal product of capital is measured as the...

Human capital is identified as one of the main determinants of economic growth and plays an important role in the technological progress of countries. Nevertheless, existing studies have to some extent neglected the importance of human capital on growth via the interaction it can have with a...

Extensive literature on the contribution of knowledge spillovers to growth and development at the regional level exists but these studies mainly features regions characterised by a high level of economic development. This paper assesses the importance of knowledge spillovers for firms located in...

Studies on the impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on the Chinese economy have essentially focused on the relationship between FDI, productivity and economic growth, revealing a tendency toward sectoral and macroeconomic empirical studies. This work aims to complement these approaches and...

Existing illustrations of the learning phenomenon either stress the relationship between flows and stocks, neglecting the chronological time variable, or the speed of knowledge accumulation along time, neglecting the nature of the underlying learning process. In this paper we present a graphical...

The Minimum Cost Network Flow Problem (MCNFP) includes a wide range of combinatorial optimization problems. Many applications exist for MCNFPs for instance supply chains, logistics, production planning, communications and transportations. Concave costs are, in many applications, more realistic...

Scientific literature is prolific both on exact and on heuristic solution methods developed to solve optimization problems. Although the former methods have an indisputable theoretical value when it comes to solve large realistic combinatorial optimization problems they are usually associated...