Search results for "Comparative advantage"
showing 7 items of 27 documents
INNOVATION AS A KEY FACTOR IN THE INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIVENESS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
2013
There is international scientific consensus that economic progress will be driven by innovation, namely the invention and application of new technologies. Research and Development (R&D) is one category of spending that develops and drives these new technologies. From the perspective of competiveness, private sector firms are prone to focus their R&D on “applied” projects and many government-sponsored technological advances have been instrumental in driving economic growth and rising living standards. According to the published literature, it is expected that countries engaging in R&D activities have a comparative advantage in export of products, and countries with the “largest” R&D expendit…
ON THE ONSET OF POST-COMMUNIST INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT IN CENTRAL AND EAST EUROPEAN ECONOMIES
2013
In the course of the last twenty odd years, Central and East-European economies have been striving to reform an inherited flawed trade structure, in an attempt to increase their industrial competitiveness and improve their position within the international division of labor. The respective countries have gone through an industrial metamorphosis that swept away the legacy of socialist autarky, making them better-equipped to deal with globalization challenges. The dismantling of the COMECON forced CEEs to institute severe constraints on public budgets; as a consequence, the price of physical capital edged up relative to the price of labor thereby making the respective economies relative abund…
NEW EU MEMBER COUNTRIES ARE PHASING OUT LABOR-INTENSIVE ACTIVITIES: AN ECONOMETRIC APPROACH
2012
This paper deals with the process of industrial development that has been unfolding in Central and East-European Countries during the last two decades, with special focus on changes in international specialization induced by successive shifts in comparative advantage. As it was to be expected, these advances have gradually improved the respective countries’ exports structure, the most important mutation residing in the gradual abandoning of subcontracting agreements – mostly confined to assembly-of-imported-inputs – and the expansion of the production of knowledge and human capital-intensive goods and services. European integration has most certainly been acting as a catalyst for this proce…
STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN INTERNATIONAL TRADE: INTER-INDUSTRY SHIFTS IN COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE
2012
The contemporary industrial configuration centered on intra-firm trade and cross border commodity chains has made comparative advantage look like a rusty concept. Prior to globalization, shifts in comparative advantage would occur mainly across industries, causing clear-cut changes in countries’ specialization patterns. By contrast, when factors of production are allowed to move freely across national boundaries, the picture gets somewhat fuzzy: the comparative advantage concept requires a different approach that should take into account the increasing disintegration of production processes and spreading of economic activities across the globe. Due to their relatively high mobility and prop…
PATTERNS OF COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGES AND THEIR CHANGE FOR THE WINE INDUSTRY IN THE INTERNATIONAL SCENARIO
2015
The aim of this study is to analyse the specialization patterns of the main wine world actors, consumers and traders, so as to verify whether or not the patterns of comparative advantages for the trade of this countries have experienced significant changes over the period 2003-2012. The analysis carried out through the estimating of Lafay index reveals deep changes in the global wine market. In particular Italy, France, and Spain, though keeping an unquestioned importance in the international scenario, are experiencing a progressive loss of competitiveness. Differently, new countries have reinforced their presence in the international market, and among them Chile for the bottled wines, and …
The dynamics of Italian competitive positioning in the Mediterranean Bluefin tuna industry
2020
The bluefin tuna or Thunnus thynnus is one of the widely recognised fish species since ancient times. Italy is the most important players in the international arena, however, the introduction of a system of total allowable catches and other measures established by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, has deeply changed the competitive positioning of Italy. The aim of this study is to perform an analysis of the comparative advantage of Italy by using the relative trade advantage index. Findings reveal that Italy has gained a competitive advantage in the Maltese market and has suffered a loss of the historical competitive advantage in the Japanese one. Results …
Manufacturing export performance and public capital: an analysis by country technology position
2021
The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between public capital and manufacturing export performance. It also aims at investigating whether this relationship depends on the proximity of a country's technology frontier. To achieve this, we adopted a methodology that estimates the elasticities of public capital as a non-rival factor in a model that considers factor intensity as a mechanism of industrial development. We use an interaction model with panel data from 1999 to 2014 across 35 advanced and less advanced countries. Our results show that in countries far from the technology frontier, public capital accumulation is an element of industrial development as opposed to co…