The literature on clustering has highlighted several advantages of industrial agglomerations. Persons and firms benefit from the production and innovation activities of neighbouring companies in the same and related industries. Considering such benefits, Michael Porter states that clustering is...

As competition increases, Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing becomes an important issue in Portuguese industry. After a brief review of its history, elements, advantages and limitations, this paper presents the results of a postal questionnaire survey about JIT system sent to a sample of...

One important issue in firms’ governance is how to create incentives so that activity centres can become more efficient. In this paper, we first introduce an agency contract where the salary of the manager of an activity centre that produces an intermediate product is dependent of its...

Make-to-order companies, such as job shops, have been extensively studied. Some of those studies emphasise the importance of the workload control in order to improve manufacturing operations. In this paper a multiple decision-making scheme, with the purpose of planning and controlling operations...

This paper proposes an evolutionary model that captures the main dynamics of a world where heterogeneous firms and workers interact and co-evolve. Within a micro-meso perspective, the model focuses on the influence of firms' "institutional settings" on industry dynamics, formalizing these...

In this paper I investigate whether, in market equilibrium, one observes price dispersion and search when buyers intend to acquire several products whose price is unknown and exists a positive search cost. Although that seems fruitful, I prove that in market equilibrium it is not observed...

Natural resources and physical cultural resources, termed in this paper as “Environmental Resources”, can be important assets for regional competitiveness and innovation. In recent years, these kinds of assets are being more considered in regional development strategies, because they can be...

The creation of the European Monetary Union has led to a substantial increase in the discussion of the importance of fiscal discipline and adequate fiscal rules in such a monetary union. The “European” solution has been challenged by many authors and politicians: among the main questions...

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...

This paper deals with the relationship between innovation and economic growth in the context of developed world. After examining the correlation between economic growth and R&D (research and development) intensity, and given that the impact of R&D on economic growth is mediated by the rate of...