The quality of institutions is at the core of the differences in the growth of income and productivity of nations. A growing body of evidence shows how this is also true at the firm level. After taking stock of earlier theoretical and empirical literature on the efficiency of state-owned versus private enterprises, while we consider ownership as the core internal governance mechanism of firms, we add quality of government as a determinant of the external institutional environment. To disentangle the effect of internal and external institutions on firms' productivity, we use different sets of ownership and institutional environment indicators. After having identified the top 350 private, state-invested (i.e. partially state-owned) and state-owned enterprises in the telecommunications industry in EU28 and in more than 60 other countries between 2007 and 2015, we empirically investigate models of firms' productivity augmented with ownership and quality of government. Our findings suggest that, after controlling for the regulatory and competitive conditions at the country level, on average, public ownership has a negative impact on firm-level TFP. This effect is however mitigated by high external institutional quality and even reversed in some countries with a particularly favourable institutional environment.
Smart City policies have attracted significant funding over the last few 1 years. However, only less evidence is available of their impact on urban economic 2 performance. In this paper, we look at the urban growth and innovation impact of 3
Smart policies at the urban (smart city initiatives) and the regional (smart specialisation Strategies, S3) level, both fostered by the need to better spend the reduced budget available for EU policy-making, have recently gained much attention. While some attempts have been made to explore the growth potential of the two policies separately, no empirical analysis has considered their joint contribution to regional growth. This paper identifies two types of development (measured as 2008--2010 GDP growth) effects associated to smart policies: one, short-run, associated to urban smartness initiatives, and a second, long run, linked to S3. Instrumental variables estimates are used to support the conceptual framework suggested for the link between these two types of policies, which are both found to have a positive impact on regional economic performance.
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