We argue that, with an elasticity of substitution in consumption greater than one and higher scale economies in the skill-intensive sectors, the entire volume of world trade matters for wage inequality. This implies that trade integration, even among identical countries, is likely to increase...

Markups vary widely across industries and countries, their heterogeneity has increased overtime and asymmetric exposure to international trade seems partly responsible for this phenomenon. In this paper, we study how the entire distribution of markups affects re- source misallocation and welfare...

New Economic Geography (NEG) models are difficult to confront with the data, since "on the one hand, they generally emphasise the unleashing of agglomeration forces after trade liberalisation, but on the other hand, they also accomodate multiple equilibria and non-monotonicity" (Brülhart,...

We argue that, in the presence of asymmetric countries, a trade agreement that conforms to GATT’s reciprocity rule allows the (stronger) less trade dependent country to improve its welfare relative to both the free trade and the trade war. Conversely, the (weaker) more trade dependent country...

We review the micro-level evidence on the effects of trade and investment liberalization in the developing world. The main findings can be summarized as follows. 1) There is evidence of trade-induced productivity gains; 2) These gains mainly stem from the intra-industry real-location of...

In this paper we analyse the dynamics of trade patterns in the six largest industrialised countries and in eight fast growing Asian economies. For each of these countries we study the shape of the sectoral distribution of an index of trade specialisation and its evolution over time. Our analysis...

The Italian industrial sector is characterized by a number of peculiarities compared to other advanced countries. One of these is the small average size of its firms. This particular model of organization of production, based on the small dimension and often on informal relationships within and...

The paper provides a contribution to the recent debate about targets and effectivenessof network policies at the EU level, by presenting a detailed analysis of the large R&D network that has emerged over Framework Programmes. Social network analysis and graph theory are employed to describe...

This paper analyzes the manufacturing sector of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic between 1993 and 2001 and provides a set of stylized facts concerning the changes occurred in the skill composition of the workforce and in the earning structure by skills on one hand, and in trade flows and...

Despite a declining trend in its world export market share since the beginning of the 90s, Italy is still today the world’s 7th exporter and importer, 7th as share of world GDP, 25th in the ranking of world per capita incomes in PPP terms. However Italy’s potential growth of output and...