Economy of the knowledge, city and competitiveness

Abstract

Since the late 80’s, Barcelona has become an international metropolis where the international competitiveness of the Spanish economy has mainly been concentrated. Until now, the ways of understanding the reasons why Barcelona’s economic performance has achieved such a remarkable situation are taken principally from an urban perspective. Different research programs have underlined the existence of specifically territorial competitiveness elements: closeness to European markets, broadening of the metropolitan area, and the existence of territorial-based external economies as localization, urbanization and network economies. This research points out another feature in Barcelona’s new economic model that is also common to other of the most developed cities and economies of the world; changing their production foundations towards a fundamental issue: the boost for knowledge- based economy. The aim is to find out how far the changes detected in the ways of production and in the location of the economic activity are linked with the growing of high-densely knowledge-based activities; and whether the international success of the Barcelona’s model could be partly explained by the growing up of higher technology and high-densely knowledge-based activities.

Keywords

• Knowledge-based economy
• urban economics
• urban indicators
• competitivity