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Jesus Felipe, Neil Foster McGregor, Önder Nomaler and myself just published a book entitled “Innovation and Structural Transformation in Asia”. It is a short volume that highlights some recent economic trends in the Asian global regions. The main source of the book is a database that we created that documents structural change, growth, technological change…
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25 December 2018 (slight update August 2025) All my life I have been living close to the (Belgian) border. When I was a kid, there was still (occasional) border control, and I was told stories of old times when smugglers were active, or when – during WWI – the Germans put an electric fence on…
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Ik trad ook een aantal keren op in de TV-programma’s van L1: De Limburgse radiozender L1 zendt op zondag het discussie- en opinieprogramma De Stemming uit. In de volgende afleveringen mocht ik aantreden:
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Een aantal jaren lang hadden we thuis of in de buurt een aantal paarden of ponies. Die tijd ligt inmiddels achter ons, maar de herinnering leeft voort! The horses that were once in our lives. Jumper Uschi Voberlina (Vi) Apache en Kio Gravin Kiolien (Kio)
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Oxford University Press just published the book “New Perspectives on Structural Change”, which was edited by Neil Foster-McGregor, Ludo Alcorta, Eddy Szirmai and myself. We worked on this book for several years, with a large team of authors, who are all top scholars in the field. New Perspectives on Structural Change is a comprehensive edited…
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Can we think about economic growth without technology developing further? Perhaps we can, if the robots can take over… Önder Nomaler and I develop a model that was published in Economics of Innovation and New Technology, in which we show how this may work. In short: instead of technology making work ever-more productive, it could…
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The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate just published our evaluation report on the R&D tax credit policy WBSO, for the period 2011-2017. The evaluation was done in a collaboration between Dialogic, APE and UNU-MERIT. I worked on the econometric part of the evaluation, together with the people at APE. We found that the…
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Those of you following the literature on the economic effects of R&D may have seen a paper by Van Elk et al. on the economic effects of investment in public R&D. Those who really follow that literature well may have seen both the working paper version, and the officially published one, and have noticed a…
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One important topic in my work is the analysis of patent citation networks. These networks are kind of special, because they are a-cyclical and directed (contrary to most other networks that economists analyze, which often contain cycles and are non-directed). This work started with a publication in Advances in Complex Systems, dealing with fuel cells.…
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The topic of growth rate differentials between countries has been a main theme in my work from the very beginning. It was the main topic of my PhD thesis of 1992. Chapter 6 of that thesis contains my model of catching up and falling behind (see picture below), which was also published in 1991 in…
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23 december 2017 Het Sphinxkwartier aan de Boschstraat in Maastricht is volop in beweging. De oude industriewijk is bezig aan een tweede jeugd, en bruist volop. De voorlopige kroon op het werk had de 120 meter lange passage in het opgeknapte Eiffelgebouw moeten worden, waar een tegeltableau is verrezen waarin de geschiedenis van de Sphinx…