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...

In traditional trade models, whether based on technological differences or on relative factor endowments, merchandise composition and directions of trade are derived from closed-economy, pre-trade conditions. But nowadays one the basic assumptions of traditional trade models, i.e. that...

In this paper, we assess the extent of offshoring in the Italian manufacturing industries, and we study how this phenomenon is affecting the skill composition of employment. Measuring offshoring using the import-use matrices of input-output tables, firstly we estimate the impact of offshoring on...

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...

After a prolonged postwar period of remarkable foreign ownership penetration, in the last two decades Italy lost its high position as a country of destination of worldwide inward FDI. At the beginning of the new millennium, Italy ranks about 13 th regarding the stock, and 21 st regarding the...

This paper extends the LSDV bias approximations in Bun and Kiviet (2003) to unbalanced panels. The approximations are obtained by modify-ing the within operator to accommodate the dynamic selection rule. They are accurate, with higher order terms bringing only decreasing improve-ments to the...

This paper analyzes the contribution of Virtual Design Tools (VDTs) to the processes of knowledge replication and recombination in the context of product innovation. On the basis of an in depth case study of two automotive firms engaged in two comparable new product development projects, we show...

This paper presents a critical review of the Global Value Chain literature in light of the “Technological Capabilities” approach to innovation in LDCs. Participation in GVC is beneficial for firms in LDCs, which are bound to source technology internationally. However, the issues of learning...