We explore the impact of FDI and imports, disaggregated at the sectorial level, on the upgrading of African exports. We distinguish flows from other developing countries (South-South) and developed countries (North-South), and find that they impact differently on the ability of recipients to...

This paper analyses the impact of China on the export performance of Italy and Germany to their main trading partners in the OECD markets. Given a strong specialization in the manufacturing sector, these two countries are exposed to China’s competition. Italy, with a productive structure based...

We empirically analyze the host-country determinants of Chinese outbound foreign direct investments (ODI) in the period from 2003 to 2008, using disaggregated data by country and sector and distinguishing between State-owned enterprises (SOEs) and privately owned firms. Our results show that the...

This paper adopts multilevel analysis to analyse the agglomeration-performance nexus for domestic firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. We show that contextual factors such as country, city and industry together explain up to 30% of the variance in firms’ productivity. Our results show also that...

This paper explores the impact of being part of a supply chain on the internationalization of firms. We show that even small and less productive firms, if involved in production chains, can take advantage of reduced costs of entry and economies of scale that enhance their probability to become...