This paper investigates the size and scope of global production sharing in the telecom sector by analysing the international pattern of trade in telecom parts and components using bilateral trade statistics over the period 1978-2000. The results show that since 1995 the US have taken over the...

This paper examines the empirical dynamics of countries' technological specialization in six technology fields using distribution dynamics, a methodology involving non-parametric estimation of probability distributions and Markov stochastic kernels for each field. Innovation in all the fields is...

This paper investigates e-commerce strategies when in addition to the price, firms can control the size of the market area. Due to the shape of the commercial costs (e.g. costs of the e-commerce activity) the following results emerge: 1) if the average costs of commercial are decreasing in the...

The expansion of South-North and South-South FDI reflects the rise of cross-border capital flows, a distinguishing feature of the contemporary global economy, together with the increasing size and complexity of emerging market multinational corporations (EMNCs). Against this background, in...

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...

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,...

The paper aims at examining the drivers of the adoption of the Internet banking, in order to understand its role with respect to the traditional banking activity and to offer a comprehensive picture of the diffusion of such a technology within the sector. In doing so, it analyses the role of...

This paper examines how the nature of the technological regime governing innovative activities and the structure of demand interact in determining market structure, with specific reference to the pharmaceutical industry. The key question concerns the observation that - despite high degrees of...

This paper has been prepared as a contribution of the Italian Social and Economic Council to the recurrent debate about critical issues on official development assistance, with some specific reference to the Italian position in this area. After some introductory remarks in Section 1, in Section...

We study the effect of financing constraints on the decision to do R&D and on the level of R&D investment using survey data and complete financial accounting data on a large number of Italian manufacturing SMEs from 2001 to 2003. We use a direct indicator of credit constraints and employ an...