The community structure of two real-world financial networks, namely the board network and the ownership network of the firms of the Italian Stock Exchange, is analyzed by means of the maximum modularity approach. The main result is that both networks exhibit a strong community structure and,...

A relevant share of the theoretical and empirical analysis on economic growth has been devoted to finding a specific role for international trade in reinforcing countries' growth rates. Not as much attention has been dedicated to the role of sectoral composition of export in influencing the...

In this paper, the authors start from the observation of two apparently contradictory trends: the increasing regionalization of trade and the proliferation of regional trade agreements, on the one hand, and the increase of the average number of trading partners of each country and of the trading...

International fragmentation of production towards some low labor-cost countries is the strategy followed by industrialized countries to counter the growing competitive pressures from other low labor-cost countries. Using custom data on Outward Processing Trade by EU textile and apparel firms we...

This paper aims to contribute to the current debate on aid effectiveness and suitability by examining a specific aspect of the problem: the theoretical and empirical relationship between tied aid and trade flows. In the first part, we evaluate the theoretical implications of the use of tied aid...