On cover & title page: OECD documents

The authors emphasize that an economy's competitiveness relies on purposive and intermeshed measures at the meta-, macro-, meso-, and micro- level and a multidimensional guidance concept consisting of competition, dialogue and shared decision-making which integrates the key groups of actors.

Our Continent, Our Future presents the emerging African perspective on this complex issue. The authors use as background their own extensive experience and a collection of 30 individual studies, 25 of which were from African economists, to summarize this African perspective and articulate a path for the future. They underscore the need to be sensitive to each country's unique history and current condition. They argue for a broader policy agenda and for a much more active role for the state within what is largely a market economy. Finally, they stress that Africa must, and can, compete in an increasingly globalized world and, perhaps most importantly, that Africans must assume the leading role in defining the continent's development agenda.

Cities are becoming the wealth producing centers of national economies. Increasing the operational efficiency of the city will bring a competitive edge to the whole system. Yet, many city subsystems cannot work together, creating significant problems and inefficiencies. City Competitiveness and Improving Urban Subsystems: Technologies and Applications uses information science perspectives to improve working subsystems in transportation, sewage, electricity, water, communication, education, health, governance, and infrastructure since their efficient and synchronized operation is vital for a competitive city. This pioneering approach will interest researchers, professionals, and policymakers in urban economy, regional planning, and information science disciplines who wish to improve the competitiveness of their cities.

There is now a wide spread interest in regions as a key focus in the organization and governance of economic growth and wealth creation. This important book considers the factors that influence and shape the competitive performance of regions. This is not just an issue of academic interest and debate, but also of increasing policy deliberation and action. However, as the readings in this book make clear, the very idea of regional competitiveness is itself complex and contentious. Many academics and policy makers have used the concept without fully considering what is meant by the term and how it can be measured. Policy formulation has tended to rush ahead of understanding and analysis, and the purpose of this book is to close this important gap in understanding. This book was previously published as a special issue of Regional Studies.

Using detailed trade and firm-level financial data, the authors demonstrate, for example, that while links between finance and competitiveness are strong, they are not uniform across sectors and countries. This book examines the link between finance and competitiveness at the macro and sectoral levels in seven different countries: Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, and Tunisia, and investigates key international issues, such as the evidence of the impact of exchange rate variability on trade, patterns in bank lending, and trade openness and development.

First Published in 1999. The process of globalization is shaped and reinforced by a rapidly changing knowledge environment. As economies become less constrained national frontiers they become more geographically specialized. Thus, important elements of the innovation process tend to become regional rather than national. In this new environment, large corporations are weakening their links with their home country, spreading their innovation activities to source different regional systems of innovation. Regional networks of forms are creating new forms of learning and production. The aim of this book is to broaden, both conceptually and empirically, the 'national systems of innovation' approach, developed by Lundvall, Freeman, Nelson and others. While recognizing the creative nature of economic adjustment in a turbulent world and the highly uneven distribution of economic growth, the national systems approach lacks a mechanism by which to understand innovation when realistic unit of analysis is no longer the nation state. Written by leading scholars in the field, this book provides a ground-breaking examination of sub-regional systems of innovation in an interconnected global economy.