Does North-South trade favors training effects : What to learn from trade sophistication links?

This work proposes to analyse learning opportunities in North-South trade. Without a direct measure of knowledge transmission, we use export and import sophistications in order to evaluate learning effects for Sub-Saharan African (SSA) and Developing Asian (DA) countries with regard to their trade with the North. We employ panel estimation techniques and a heterogeneous causality analysis to establish the existence of a causal relation between export and import sophistications for a sample of northern countries.