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This study addresses the following research questions: what happens to the propensity to collaborate with other firms, once the researcher creates her own venture? Do her collaborations decrease or do they grow? These questions have been overlooked by the current literature, even though they carry important policy implications. Our key suggestion is that the effectiveness of a technology transfer tool can be better assessed by taking into account the possible crowding-out effects with other channels of knowledge transfer. We do so for Italy, by comparing the behavior of single researchers, before and after the establishment of their own firm, with the behavior of a control group. We assess whether those academics that founded their own firm significantly change their attitude to perform research collaborations with other firms by means of co-publication and co-patenting. We also verify whether creating a firm has an impact on the overall patenting and publication performance. Our results suggest that there is a negative effect on the overall publishing performance, while the patenting activity does not change significantly. Regarding co-publications, our results confirm the existence of a substitution effect between spin-offs and co-publication with firms, while we observe an increase in the case of co-patenting. A closer look at the data, however, suggests that the latter is mainly triggered by the patenting activity that the researcher performs with his or her own compan

We analyse one of the most important policy experiences for industrial clustering in Southern China—the Specialised Towns programme—that has transformed some Chinese clusters into the backbone of global production chains. We offer a long-term, detailed overview of the policy programme and of Guangdong’s specialised towns, classifying them as endogenous or exogenous according to their features, and investigate their contribution to local growth and rebalancing. This analysis of the Specialised Towns programme contributes to the international debate on revisiting industrial policy and suggests that the discussion should conceive them as articulated processes to reach long-term societal objectives.

World Development is a multi-disciplinary monthly journal of development studies. It seeks to explore ways of improving standards of living, and the human condition generally, by examining potential solutions to problems such as: poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, disease, lack of shelter, environmental degradation, inadequate scientific and technological resources, trade and payments imbalances, international debt, gender and ethnic discrimination, militarism and civil conflict, and lack of popular participation in economic and political life.Contributions offer constructive ideas and analysis, and highlight the lessons to be learned from the experiences of different nations, societies, and economies. World Development recognizes 'development' as a process of change involving nations, economies, political alliances, institutions, groups, and individuals. Development processes occur in different ways and at all levels: inside the family, the firm and the farm; locally, provincially, nationally, and globally. Our goal is to learn from one another, regardless of nation, culture, income, academic discipline, profession or ideology. We hope to set a modest example of enduring global cooperation through maintaining an international dialogue and dismantling barriers to communication. Benefits to authorsWe also provide many author benefits, such as free PDFs, a liberal copyright policy, special discounts on Elsevier publications and much more. Please click here for more information on our author services. Please see our Guide for Authors for information on article submission. If you require any further information or help, please visit our Support Center Authors are also welcome to submit to the journal?s companion title, World Development Perspectives. AUDIENCE. Development practitioners, scholars and researchers in the field of development studies, including those in such disciplines as economics, political science, sociology, geography, anthropology, engineering and science policy, management and administration, agronomy, urban and regional planning, medicine and health care.

Spatially targeted policies have been a crucial component of the development strategy pursued by the Chinese government. This paper provides novel empirical evidence in the debate on place-based policy by testing whether the presence of economic development zones is associated with higher values of industrial output and their impact is heterogeneous across territories in the counties/districts in Guangdong during the period 2000-2014. The results show that the level of industrial output is positively correlated with the presence of economic development zones and offer support to the idea that place-based policies have heterogeneous effects across territories.