Der anhaltende Produktivitätsvorsprung der USA sowie die zunehmende Konkurrenz aus den Schwellenländern führen in Europa seit Mitte der 1990er-Jahre zu einer intensiven Auseinandersetzung mit Fragen der Wettbewerbsfähigkeit. Höhepunkt ist der jüngste Appell der Europäischen Kommission zur...

This paper argues that official development assistance (foreign aid) is partly responsible for the lack of structural change in Africa. Africa's development partners have devoted too few resources and too little attention to two critical constraints to private investment, infrastructure and...

Along the development path, countries experience large transformations in their economic structure as productive resources move towards different economic activities. ''Modern economic growth'' is also associated with a self-sustained process of technical change which leads to the emergence of...

This research report investigates the relationship between the growing integration into global and regional value chains (VCs) and structural change in the South and South East Asian (SEA) region. The analysis includes a sample of 60 developed and developing countries covered in the OECD's...

This paper uses a theoretical model with Directed Technical Change to analyse the observed heterogeneous energy intensity developments. Based on the empirical evidence on the underlying drivers of energy intensity developments, we decompose changes in aggregate energy intensity into structural...

The transition towards a greener, less carbon-intensive economy leads to a growing demand for green products, services and business processes. In theory, this trend should lead to a greening of jobs, i.e. to an increasing share of environmentally friendly requirements within occupations...

The economic nature of agricultural cooperatives is explained by means of a logical continuation of the organizational economics rationale for family farms. The traditional explanations of the importance of family farms is discussed, and embedded in a broader framework which considers their...

The South African services sector is large and growing. This coupled with declining employment shares in manufacturing and mining (i.e. deindustrialization) suggests that South Africa is a de facto service-orientated economy. Employment patterns in services reveal a segmentation that is...

This paper is intended to provide an updated discussion on a series of issues that the relevant literature suggests to be crucial in dealing with the challenges a middle income country may encounter in its attempts to further catch-up a higher income status. In particular, the conventional...