Why do states persist in offering large financial incentives to firms to induce them to invest in the state, a practice commonly derided as “smoke-stack chasing”? The conventional wisdom is that while incentives may be a poor long term economic development strategy, they are a good political strategy for governors seeking to improve economic conditions and political support in the short term. U...

Based on China’s inter-provincial panel data from 1999–2009, this paper has tested the impact and extent of marketization, government governance, and legal environment of sustainable economic development by controlling physical capital, human capital and productivity, so as to find the institutional reality for the difference in China’s economic development and another explanation for it. It tu...

This paper discusses the application of Sustainable Livelihood Approach in assessing the impact of using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in microenterprises in developing countries. Microenterprises contribute mainly towards socio-economic development by acting as a source of income and employment. The effectiveness of microenterprises is often curtailed by a range of challenge...

The paper has its focus on water's key functions behind ecosystem dynamics and the water-related balancing involved in a catchment-based ecosystem approach. A conceptual framework is being developed to address fundamental trade-offs between humans and ecosystems. This is done by paying attention to society's unavoidable landscape modifications and their unavoidable ecological effects mediated b...

Three recent state economic development proposals are reviewed and compared with one another. A similar policy effort currently underway in Massachusetts is also reviewed in terms of its process and likely outcome. The reports, from Ohio, Washington, and Rhode Island, are reviewed along three dimensions: institutional setting and process, substance and framework of the economic analysis, and pr...

Lying in a transformation period of economic development, economic prosperity, social progress and development in science and technology have to rely on strong competitiveness of a nation’s universities to a large degree. Actually, universities’ competitiveness is closely related to the improvement of a nation’s competitiveness in human resources, industrial development and its comprehensive st...

The institutional differences between presidential and parliamentary rule are well known, yet the practical effects of these divergent constitutional arrangements within democratic polities have received scant attention. This paper employs a global dataset to test the relationship between a historical measure of parliamentary rule and fourteen indicators ranging across three policy areas: polit...

Rapid growth in demand for lignocellulosic bioenergy will require major changes in supply chain infrastructure. Even with densification and preprocessing, transport volumes by mid-century are likely to exceed the combined capacity of current agricultural and energy supply chains, including grain, petroleum, and coal. Efficient supply chains can be achieved through decentralized conversion proce...

In this paper we investigates the co-evolution of pearl industry cluster and specialized market in Zhuji. Firstly we begin with a literature review of the specialized market, which played a crucial role as a shared trading platform for SMEs, and an institutional innovation to achieve economic transformation and for China to promote industrialization, urbanization and regional economic developme...