Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) account for about 99% of all enterprises in Croatia as well as in the EU economy. In most industries, SMEs attribute to much of the capital stock, employment, and a significant fraction of innovations. Among all SMEs, those that are growth-oriented make...

The paper presents issues related to the risk of growth failure of SMEs operating in the shadow economy and discusses determinants and paths of business growth. The participation of companies in the shadow economy affects their operations, and thus the processes of their growth. On the one hand,...

Small enterprises operating under conditions of uncertainty ought to introduce innovative solutions oriented towards their growth and development. As numerous studies indicate, small businesses are gradually intensifying their efforts to increase their ability to implement innovative changes....

Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade liberalization provides incentive to change institutions in two ways. On the one hand, trade leads to specialization according to comparative advantage, expanding the industries that do...

Many cross-country studies acknowledge the indispensable role of institutions in promoting economic growth and in sustaining economic development. So, their emphases have shifted to determine the most influential institution(s) in order to be specific. While these papers are widespread in the...

We present a simple model that illustrates how democracy may improve the quality of economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracy on institutional quality is increasing...

The importance of political local coalitions in shaping local governance structures conducive to economic growth has been a subject of research for numerous years, both in rich economies as well as in emerging countries. In spite of such amount of research, little attention has yet been paid to...

The role of R&D investment on firm's performance is not clear from a theoretical perspective. While the effort in R&D activities conducted internally helps firms to develop the ability to identify, assimilate and apply external knowledge successfully (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990), such activities...

A large and still growing body of literature suggests that entrepreneurship is of exceptional importance in explaining regional specific efficiencies of knowledge spillovers. Although quantifying the impact of entrepreneurial activity for economic growth is an interesting issue -- particularly...

This paper investigates the main determinants of economic growth in the European Union from a regional perspective. The analysis is based on a recently available dataset from the European Cluster Observatory covering 253 European regions over the period 2002-2008. In addition to the traditional...