The European Quality Index (EQI) constructed by Charron et al. ( 2014) is a survey-based index of the quality of government at the regional level for European member states. The index is based on a survey of European citizens' perceptions about the quality of institutions. EQI specifically measures the levels of quality of government among 172 EU regions based on the experiences and perception of citizens. Sixteen survey questions are asked, in accordance with the four 'pillars' of the World Bank's WGI: rule of law, government effectiveness, voice and accountability, and control of corruption. 1 Questions are centred on three public services that are often funded or administered at subnational levels: education, healthcare and law enforcement. The survey asks respondents to rate the provision of these three categories of public services with respect to three related concepts of institutional quality, i.e., quality, impartiality and level of corruption. Data are aggregated using different weighting schemes to obtain a robust indicator of EQI and its single components. Full details are given in Charron et al. (2014).For firms' micro-data, we resort to the EU-EFIGE Bruegel-UniCredit dataset provided by the Belgian non-profit international association Bruegel. This dataset contains both survey and balance-sheet data (the latter drawn from the BvD Amadeus database) on a representative sample of approximately 15,000 manufacturing firms with at least ten employees operating in seven European countries: Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. Details on the criteria, the sampling design and the weighting schemes employed to ensure standard statistical representativeness of the collected data (ex-ante and ex-post for each country) are too technical to be reported hereand we refer to the extensive discussions in Altomonte et al. (2012). From the EFIGE dataset, we draw a measure of firms' TFP for each year in the 2010-2014 period. To compute this measureovercoming endogeneity problems and allowing for industry-specific production functionsobservations have been assigned to sectors (at NACE 2 digit levels), and then, the Levinsohn and Petrin model has been applied to each sector, con-

This paper investigates the combined role of innovation support policies and firm's own innovative activities on the performance of Chinese small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in high-tech sectors. By distinguishing two components of innovative activitiesresearch and development (R&D) investments and embedded innovative capacitythe paper develops and tests an integrative moderated moderation model. The results suggest that in Chinese high-tech SMEs innovation-support policies positively moderate the relationship between R&D investments and performance, but this positive effect diminishes when there are higher levels of embedded innovative capacity. These results highlight that the relationship between government innovation policies and a firm's own R&D investments is not only reciprocal but also more complex than the one so far analyzed in the literature. The results show in particular that the effects of innovation-support policies on R&D investments is not as neat as it seems, because of the internal balance within the firm between investment in R&D and other sources of innovation. Therefore, although innovation support policies have been found to help Chinese SMEs in high-tech sectors benefit from their R&D investments, these policies are particularly effective only when R&D investments are significantly driving firms' innovative activities. This highlights the relevance of both government support and a firm's own efforts in the competitive modernization of Chinese SMEs

Applying a strategic decision-making perspective on the economics of business, we suggest that a competitive locality in the health industry is one that, relative to other localities, is effective in: (1) providing the healthcare that enables everyone to participate fully in the democratic development of the locality; (2) providing the healthcare that is democratically identified as a direct objective of this development; (3) contributing through the health industry to any other democratically determined objectives of the locality's development. The paper hypothesizes that strategic decision-making in organizations is an especially significant determinant of the impacts of the health industry. We conclude that: (i) a locality that suffers concentration in the power to determine the objectives of its health industry could not be strictly competitive in that industry; (ii) the first best way to achieve competitiveness in the health industry would be to democratize its strategic decision-making. What this would entail in practice is discussed in some detail.health industry, competitiveness, strategic decision-making, economic development, economic democracy,

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