The role of Libraries in Cultural Centres Abroad: an insight

This research paper sets up a typology of libraries managed by cultural centres abroad. Nearly 2,200 libraries linked to a dozen of different cultural organizations provide not only traditional services such as loan and access to printed and audiovisual materials but they also approach local citizens, offering help and services in matters of education, literacy, cooperation, social issues or development. These actions may fit under the label of cultural diplomacy actions. This paper analyses the relevance of those cultural centres and offers a classification through a table including networks of institutions of the thirty most significant cultural centres worldwide.

Measuring the economic impact of Research Joint Ventures supported by the EU Framework Programme

The objective of this paper is to analyse the effects of international R&D cooperation on firms’ economic performance. Our approach, based on a complete data set with information about Spanish participants in research joint ventures supported by the EU Framework Programme during the period 1995-2005, establishes a recursive model structure to capture the relationship between R&D cooperation, knowledge generation and economic results, which are measured by labour productivity. In the analysis we take into account that the participation in this specific type of cooperative projects implies a selection process that includes both the self-selection by participants to join the consortia and the selection of projects by the European Commission to award the public aid. Empirical analysis has confirmed that: (1) R&D co-operation has a positive impact on the technological capacity of firms, captured through intan-gible fixed assets and (2) the technological capacity of firms is positively related to their productivity.