ABSTRACT
Globalization has been one of the significant megatrends reshaping the world’s economic spaces during the last three decades. The increase in foreign direct investments (FDIs), which exceeds the pace of growth in international trade, has dramatically shaped and reshaped the global economy, particularly the emerging East Asian economies. The progress of a knowledge-based economy and an information society has overlapped with globalization and resulted in the remarkable global flows of intangible assets, which include knowledge, human capital, technological know-how, and brand identities-as well as of tangible assets through FDIs and international trade of products and resources. The progress of a knowledge-based information society is coupled with two other phenomena: (1) the relative decrease in the importance of physical resource endowment as drivers of regional development and firm growth and (2) the increase in the importance of intangible assets related to personal knowledge for both firm and region (Surinach & Moreno, 2012).
