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This article uses a time–space approach to check the UK business cycle synchronization with Germany and the US. As a novelty, we consider the co-movements in terms of economic growth rate structure. In line with the existing studies, we discover that the UK business cycle is more synchronized with the US then with Germany, and that the co-movements have intensified lately. We also show that co-movements are reduced in terms of business cycle structure and are time–frequency-dependent. Finally, we point out that the UK business cycle became more synchronized with the US cycle given the contribution of investments and external balance to the real growth rate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Variations in the economic performance of nations and regions due to an ongoing globalization and economic liberalization have fuelled debates about the role of public policies in economic growth. This article contributes to the empirical debate on the role of public policies in stimulating start-ups and regional economic growth by looking at public information, public counseling services, and public start-up assistance programs for entrepreneurs in the United States and Germany. The goal of the qualitative cross-national study is to evaluate potentials of public support for entrepreneurs in a global environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools, along with families, neighborhoods, and voluntary organizations, serve as institutions of socialization, explicitly and implicitly teaching young people how to behave. Schools are especially important because they are the first formal bureaucratic organizations in which young people spend time, and such organizations are of paramount importance in developed countries, where formal associations predominate. The U.S. was the first nation to provide universal free public education, an innovation that was designed primarily to assure its democratic form of government, but that also positioned it well to prosper in an industrial age. As the U.S. economy has prospered in the 1990s, the rationale for improving the linkage between education and employment has shifted from the long-term goal of laying the foundation for economic growth to the immediate need of meeting employers' growing demand for well-educated and highly skilled workers. Global competition has increased global comparison and convergence. Just as the U.S. envied Germany's education systems at the beginning of the decade, German firms now see downsizing and corporate flexibility as the keys to success.

This article compares the relationship between economic development and public policy in two of the most prosperous regions of the 1980s: Massachusetts in the United States and Baden-Württemberg in West Germany. Beginning with a critique of the theory of the product life-cycle, the article examines the rise and fall of traditional industries in Massachusetts and their survival in Baden-Württemberg. It then goes on to consider the rise - but also the vulnerability - of the high-tech and financial firms in Massachusetts, as well as the more robust, though almost invisible growth of these sectors in Baden-Württemberg. The burden of the argument is that there are, strictly speaking, no `mature' industries and public policies aimed at stimulating innovation are most successful when the latter is integrated into the local industrial structure as a whole rather than isolated into a distinct high-tech sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]