Jacob A. Jordaan

Jacob A. Jordaan is Assistant Professor of International Macroeconomics and Economic Development at the Utrecht school of Economics. Previously, he held positions at the VU University Amsterdam and the University of Birmingham. He holds a PhD in Economic Geography from the London School of Economics and a MSc in International Economics and Economic Geography from Utrecht University. His research interests focus on the growth and productivity effects of international trade and multinational enterprises (MNEs) as main drivers of ongoing processes of globalization. One of the questions that he is particularly interested in is whether and how growth and productivity are fostered when countries specialize in different but related sets of activities. The role of MNEs in this process is indispensable, as these firms are responsible for slicing up value chains by locating activities and tasks across many different countries in the world economy. The research project offers a very good setting to study this question, in the context of identifying how entrepreneurship, FDI and other factors drive related variety of economies and how in turn related variety, FDI and entrepreneurship affect growth and productivity the national and regional level in the European Union.