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AbstractIncreased urbanization, global warming and sustainable growth belong to the major contemporary policy challenges. Today cities are home to more than 50 per cent of the world population, the largest 600 urban centres generate about 60 per cent of global GDP, and the agglomerated areas are responsible for 75 per cent of world carbon emissions. The UN estimates that 70 per cent of the world's growing population will live in cities by 2050. At the same time the world population is expected to increase from 7 billion people to 9 billion. Thus, the total number of people living in cities will be almost doubled within a period of less than 4 decades. This paper discusses two hypotheses on how this will affect climate change and economic growth.

This volume provides an understanding of firms' R&D and innovation strategies and their economy-wide consequences. It is based on the premise that differences in firm-level returns, as well as economy-wide outcomes, may be linked to the heterogeneous ways in which firms organize and undertake R&D and innovation activities. It emphasizes innovation strategies of innovating firms, and reflects that innovation efforts do not represent a uniform type of expenditure. Organized into three parts the volume moves from the micro to the macro-level. This structure highlights the notion that R&D and innovation and growth are two interdependent perspectives. The first of these is micro-oriented and focuses on innovation processes of firms, where R&D activities and other innovation efforts give rise to consequences such as a strengthening of resource bases, growth of sales and employment, patents, new products, increasing productivity and profits, and improved chances of survival

The availability of new internationally-harmonized innovation survey data collected from OECD countries has created some interesting opportunities for studying the following two key areas: (1) the determinants of innovation behavior at firm level, and (2) innovation as an important factor contributing to the economic growth. This paper looks at the relationship between innovation and productivity in Finland, Norway and Sweden at the firm level. Although these countries enjoy a high degree of political, social and cultural similarities, they differ largely from one another in their productivity growth and national innovation systems. The main objective here has been to examine how an identically-specified econometric model might work when the survey sampling and questionnaire are identical but the national data sets are estimated separately. Findings from the micro-based data in Europe known as Community Innovation Survey (CIS) data were subsequently investigated to see whether or not they contributed to explaining the presence of cross-country differences in aggregated productivity growth. Results reveal major discrepancies between the estimated firm-level results and the aggregated figures. Differences in the country regression results were investigated to see whether they were due to data errors, the econometric model, model specifications, estimation methods or unobservable country-specific effects. The tentative conclusion is that the representativeness of the respondent firms, the model specification and unobservable country-specific effects may partly account for the deviations between macro and micro levels.