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This paper aims to empirically examine the impact of high-technology trade on employment. A dynamic labour demand equation is employed to investigate the impact of high-tech trade on employment in 20 high-tech exporting countries. Using data from 2007 to 2016, this study highlights some evidence on the negative relationship between high-tech trade and employment. This paper argues the development towards high-tech trade should be accompanied by appropriate policy measures to lessen the employment effect and to ensure the benefit of growth is well-distributed among all segments of the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the relationship between innovation and export behaviour across manufacturing and services firms in Africa. The study is based on the general premise that innovation has a positive effect on firm's exports (self-selection hypothesis) and the complementary assumption that internationalisation drives firms to innovate (learning-by-exporting hypothesis). To test this complex, two-way link between innovation and exports, the study contributes to the existing literature by analysing the complementarity effects between product and process innovation in their relationship with exports. A combination of process and product innovation is expected to have a greater impact on the likelihood of firms entering the foreign market and on their export performance. Using data from 45 African countries, from 2006 to 2020, the multinomial probit and two-stage least squares models are estimated. There is support for the learning by exporting and the self-selection hypotheses for African firms. The findings also reveal the need to improve the business environment across African economies to foster greater exports and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I make use of Vietnam's enterprise surveys to estimate markups and product quality and investigate the effects of tariff preferences under the ASEAN and ASEAN+1 free trade areas (FTAs) on quality upgrading. The empirical results consistently show that Vietnam's manufacturing firms have moved toward high-quality products and speeded up the rate of quality upgrading in response to the increasing competition from regional imports. The quality responses by domestic firms are much stronger in the competitive industries with a low degree of concentration, but are insignificant in highly concentrated industries. This indicates the importance of the domestic competition condition in transmitting the effects of tariff reductions. The empirical results and findings remain robust when the margins of tariff preferences or imports are used to proxy for import competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues that easy access to new information using information and communication technologies (ICT) will bring both more technological development and information about new markets, together catalyzing high technology (high-tech) production. This paper aims to show the impact of digitalization on the technology intensity of export. We use the ICT Development Index (IDI) as a proxy for the digitalization level of a country and the value of the exports of high-tech products as a proxy for the technology intensity of export. IDI comprises three components, including ICT access, usage and skills. These statistics reflect the ICT development of the country. To analyze the relevant relationship, we use panel data on countries between 2007 and 2017. The system-generalized method of moments (system GMM) dynamic panel estimator is utilized in the estimations, permitting us to control for potential endogeneity problems between the main dependent and independent variables. Results show that in developing countries, IDI has a significant effect on the export of high-tech products. In addition, the significance of the main components of IDI varies. These results suggest that developing countries striving to increase the export of high-tech products should invest more in ICT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the determinants of companies' performance during the crisis based on their short-term (sales changes) and medium-term (exit) reaction, using firms' data from the European Firms in Global Economy (EFIGE) survey and combining them with balance-sheet statistics. The results, based on the four largest euro area countries show that vulnerability to the crisis depended on a company's mode of international operation. More sophisticated forms of internationalization increased firms' resilience in the first and second waves of the crisis. The paper also investigates the mediating role of intangible assets and financial constraints in the relationship between internationalization and companies' response to the crisis. While intangible assets were very important for preventing a drop in sales for internationalized firms immediately after 2008, they amplified the probability of firms' exit five years after the crisis in weaker European countries (Spain and Italy). At the same time, financial constraints increased companies' probability of exit. Innovation prevented a drop in firms' sales and firms' exit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the local stability of the steady slate of the generalized Lai (1995) model, i.e. the Shimizu and Okamoto (2004) model. Lai is a modified version of Grossman and Helpman (1991a, 1991b: Ch. 11) by assuming that there are two types of labour: skilled and unskilled labours. Shimizu and Okamoto (2004) generalize the Lai model by assuming that Southern knowledge stock depends not only on Southern cumulative experience but also on the number of products the North manufactures. This paper shows that the stability of steady state in the generalized Lai model has (he saddle point properly. Thus, this paper also establishes the stability of the Grossman and Helpman (1991a, 199lb: Ch. 11) model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use a classical variety-expanding growth model to analyze the policy or institutional-arrangement choice for the Southern government who faces the tradeoff between imitating Northern innovation without cost and encouraging domestic innovation. We assume that the Southern government fully respects the principle of non-discrimination and hence treats both imitations, i.e., imitation of Northern innovation and imitation of domestic innovation, equally. For a given state of the economy, we explicitly and uniquely establish an optimal degree of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection for the South. Then, we find that there is a complementary relationship between optimal IPR protection and the innovation subsidy policy, which implies that they form an effective policy mix, hence offering a useful insight for avoiding ineffective policy conflicts widely occurred in real-world economies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role of globalization in the creation and dissemination of technology across firms operating in 30 emerging and developing economies. Firm-level data from four rounds of Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Surveys from 2002 to 2014 is pooled to assess whether international exposure translates into greater propensity for firms to innovate. The viability of different channels of international technology transmission, i.e. exporting and importing activities, foreign licensing agreements and foreign direct investment are studied to analyze whether they indeed succeed in delivering the push to the firms operating in developing countries to innovate and as a result push them closer to the world's technology frontier. The empirical results endorse the view that exporting and importing activities and foreign licensing agreements are important channels for technology transfer. This study also acknowledges country, sector and firm specific characteristics and their differential capacity to benefit from foreign exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses a two-country two-firm imperfect competition model where each firm is located in a different country. We study the effects of firms' innovation and exchange rate change on their international expansion choices. As in Petit and Sanna-Randaccio (2000), the market structure is endogenously determined by the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium of a three-stage game that involves three different decisions by the firms: how to expand abroad, how much to invest in R&D, and how much to sell in each country under different market configurations. Since the price of output is directly affected by the exchange rate, we carefully include the impact of an anticipated exchange rate change in the future on firms' current decisions. The results show that an increase in R&D productivity leads firms towards multinational expansion. Furthermore, home currency appreciation also raises the likelihood of FDI by firms. Compared with the results of Petit and Sanna-Randaccio (2000), mixed duopoly is more likely to arise under exchange rate fluctuation in our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We build a dynamic and heterogeneous firm-level model that embodies joint decisions to export and innovate and allows both decisions to affect the firm's production growth. We calibrate the model based on Chinese manufacturing firm data from 2005 to 2007 and find that: (1) the industry dynamics are driven by both self-selection and learning-by-exporting mechanisms, in which firms' exports and innovation work in tandem, (2) an increasing tariff causes much a bigger negative impact than an increasing entry cost, and (3) the negative impacts of a trade conflict heavily depend on its severity as well as timing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a large sample of micro data from four waves of Community Innovation Survey for EU member states, we investigate the relationship between firms’ export status and different sorts of innovation activities. We find systematically positive relationship between the two, whereby the strongest correlation is found in case of product innovation and the weakest in case of organizational innovations. While aggregate data show that innovation success is increasing in firm size, we find that exporting has the strongest effect on innovation in the medium-sized firms. We also explore cross-country differences in the impact of export status on innovation. Countries with a higher share of exports in GDP and greater share of spending on research and development generally display a stronger correlation between exporting status and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International differences in technological activity are considered a fundamental factor in explaining differences in both levels and trends between countries' exports, imports, and income, especially among industrialized nations. This study examines the effects of innovation activity (measured by R&D expenditure and patent applications) and economic growth (GDP per capita) on trade openness (the ratio of imports plus exports to GDP) in 10 European countries from 1983 to 2018 using time series analysis. We also investigate the impact of the Lisbon and Europe 2020 strategies on trade openness. We use autoregressive distributed lag methodology and Granger causality tests based on the vector error correction model to conduct the analysis. The empirical findings indicate a strong long-run relationship among the variables in all the countries examined. In most countries, the long-run coefficients of R&D expenditure, patent applications, and GDP per capita are positive and statistically significant. In short-run dynamics, error correction models are well-defined and provide interesting results for each country. The effects of the Lisbon Strategy and Europe 2020 differ across the countries examined. Finally, the Granger causal relationships among the variables vary across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What enables Ecuadorian manufacturing firms to start exporting? And what are the determinants of the share of total sales exported by a firm, once the decision of becoming an exporter has been made? We apply a Heckman selection model to the Ecuador's Investment Climate Survey (ICS) to investigate supply-side constraints to export performance at the firm level. We estimate export propensity (the probability of exporting) and export intensity (the share of total sales that are exported). The application of the Heckman selection model to a rich dataset as the ICS is a major contribution as previous applications of the Heckman selection model used much limited datasets, limiting the range of hypotheses to be tested. Furthermore, other studies on export performance based on ICS data use either Tobit or Probit models, incurring important methodological limitations. We find robust and stable relationships for export propensity and intensity with firm size, import of inputs, labor regulations, in-house R&D, quality certification, Web use, and foreign ownership. Capacity utilization and trade with the US positively affect export intensity, while trade within the Andean Community has the opposite effect in our outcome variable. No significant relationship was found with the infrastructure variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long-run relationship between technology diffusion, (local) innovation and productivity, and the impact of government intervention on long-run economic growth, are studied using a sample of 62 countries classified into successful and unsuccessful cases of catching-up. Our dataset is constructed by combining a large suite of statistics for a 30-year period spanning 1980–2010. We rely on conventional Johansen cointegration analysis on individual countries and discuss our findings based on the mean group estimates and empirical distributions of the results for each country classification. The evidence supports the importance of the interaction between technology diffusion and innovation, and the relevance of government coordination to boost innovation and economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is primarily aimed at testing the theory of good governance in the group of eight developing Islamic countries. Using a panel data regression model, we examined the data to determine the relationship between political economy and economic development of eight countries, for the period 2005 to 2014. The results show a significant positive correlation between the rule of law, corruption control with economic growth and stock market turnover rate proxy. The examination through an artificial neural network resulted in a higher determination coefficient and less average standard error. This, in turn, reveals that the fitting power and efficiency of this method is higher than the panel data regression model. Furthermore, the findings of this study suggest that the application of good governance theory calls for more inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article develops a dynamic three-sector product variety model to analyze the role of imitation on skilled–unskilled wage inequality. One of these sectors produces varieties of innovated products with skilled labor as well as unskilled labor and another sector produces varieties of imitated products with only unskilled labor. Also, there is an R&D sector developing blueprints of new products with skilled labor as the only input. However, imitation is costless. It is shown that an increase in skilled (unskilled) labor endowment raises (lowers) the rate of growth, raises (lowers) the skilled–unskilled wage ratio, and lowers (raises) the level of social welfare. However, an increase in the rate of imitation raises this growth rate, lowers the skilled–unskilled wage ratio, and raises the level of social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effect of foreign direct investment on innovation and productivity in the host and home countries. I investigate how the flows of knowledge transmitted through FDI affect the production of knowledge in both source and recipient countries, as well as how these flows affect productivity. Using patent citations within FDI as the measure of the degree of ‘access’ that one nation gains to the R&D knowledge of another, and new patents as the measure of innovation, results reveal that there are large differences in the way FDI affects innovation and productivity between countries that are technological leaders, and technological followers. Both inward and outward FDI are found to have a strong positive effect on domestic innovation and productivity in countries that are technological followers. For technological leaders, outward FDI is highly conducive to increased domestic innovation, while inward FDI seems to increase competition between domestic and foreign firms, making it more difficult to come up with new viable ideas. As for domestic productivity, inward FDI is highly beneficial for technological leaders, while outward FDI does not have a significant effect. I conclude that technological followers have much to gain from FDI-induced R&D spillovers, and therefore governments in these countries will find it worthwhile to attract foreign multinationals, while those in the more technologically advanced economies need to weigh the costs and benefits of FDI carefully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike most studies that calculate productivity as a residual, this study uses detailed plant-level data to examine the relationship between exposure to foreign markets and specific innovations including product design, investment in new tools (such as computers), research and development, and innovation in products and processes. The results suggest that exposure to foreign markets is positively related to most types of technology. The effects seem to be stronger in recently liberalized Mexico, which may suggest that the innovation gains from liberalization are greatest in the early stages of liberalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]