This paper is concerned with the effects of globalisation of production in some footwear Italian districts. The aim is to investigate and compare the position of those districts in the process of fragmentation of production that affected the Italian footwear sector in the last few years. The...

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...

The literature on industrial districts in advanced and less developed countries has shown that clustering helps local enterprises overcome growth constraints and compete in distant markets. Nevertheless, recent contributions have stressed that more attention needs to be paid to external linkages...

In recent years, the wine industry has undergone a radical technological modernisation in which scientific research has become extremely prominent. Focusing on a regional research system related to wine, we provide a detailed account of the structural features of the research and extension...

We study the evolution of specialization patterns of the Italian provinces over 1995-2005 by analyzing the dynamics of the sectoral distribution of the Balassa index of revealed comparative advantages for several manufacturing sectors. Our results show that behind a relatively stable...