Knowledge has been widely recognised by economists as the most important factor of production in a “new economy”. The production and utilisation of knowledge is therefore essential for development. Some countries, Malaysia among others, have embarked on an ambitious plan to use knowledge as a base for economic development, by-passing earlier stages of industrialisation. Some commentators have, ...

In the past decades several attempts have been made to integrate socio-economic models with land use change (LUC) models. In most cases, however, there is a uni-directional relation from the socio-economic model(s) to the LUC model by providing land use demands based on demographic and economic developments. In this paper we present a model that allows for a more dynamic integration between bot...

If economic growth elsewhere raises an individual’s earning prospects relative to his present location, then the individual will move. However, if the individual can exploit economic growth elsewhere by commuting, he will not need to move to gain from the expansion. County-level data from eight states in the Midwest over the period 1969–1994 are used to show that local county population respond...

Competition is a crucial factor in driving economic growth. First, it places pressure on firms to increase their efficiency. Second, it ensures that more productive firms increase their market share at the expense of the less productive. These lower productivity firms may then exit the market, to be replaced by higher productivity firms. Third, in the presence of competition, firms will aim to ...

Since the 1950s, economic growth rates in industrialized countries have declined. Whereas the per capita growth rate of gross domestic product in industrial countries was 3.7 in the 1950s ind 4.2 in the 1960s, the growth rate came down to 3.0 in the 1970s and to 2.1 in the 1980s (Table 1). This picture of declining growth rates is even stronger when the growth rate is not expressed on a per cap...

In the mid-1980s the attention of economists has been directed again to problems of economic growth. Traditional Solovian growth theory based on the important role of investment has been implied a convergence of economies of different levels of development. But exactly this was unobservable in reality; on the contrary: differences between highly developed countries and those of the so-called th...