Accelerating urbanization has been viewed as an important instrument for economic development and reducing regional income disparity in some developing countries, including China. Recent studies (Bloom et al. 2008) indicate that demographic urbanization level has no causal effect on economic growth. However, due to the varying and changing definition of urban population, the use of demographic ...

1. Motivations The analysis of the factors determining different growth rates and convergence across geographical areas has been a major theme in recent years in the regional analysis of economic research. Generally, the debate has been focused on factual predictions, of different specification, of regional growth models, based on yearly data, using a cross-section approach and per capita outpu...

Innovation has widely been regarded as one of the main drivers of economic growth in the knowledge economy. This paper investigates the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the development of regional innovation capabilities using a panel dataset from China. It finds that FDI has a significant positive impact on the overall regional innovation capacity. FDI intensity is also positively ...