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Empirical studies on international trade highlight the role of innovation on international exchange but do not capture the effect of technological innovation when unobservable common factors (UCFs) are considered. This paper examines the long‐run relationship between technological innovation and international exchange using panel data for eight African countries over the period 1981–2013. The non‐stationarity and cointegration between technological innovation, international exchange, public investment, real gross domestic income and foreign direct investment were examined, controlling for cross‐sectional dependence and heterogeneity between countries. The results suggest that technological innovation in Africa remains low after controlling for UCFs, while public investment, real gross domestic product and foreign direct investment have significant impact on international exchange. Moreover, the results from the homogeneous and heterogeneous estimates, with and without UCFs, show that ignoring UCFs is likely to bias the coefficients. These findings reveal that African countries should invest more in public infrastructures and research and development to upgrade their capability To play an active role in the international market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global multiregional input-output databases (GMRIOs) became the standard tool for tracking environmental impacts through global supply chains. To date, several GMRIOs are available, but the numerical results differ. This paper considers how GMRIOs can be made more robust and authoritative. We show that GMRIOs need detail in environmentally relevant sectors. On the basis of a review of earlier work, we conclude that the highest uncertainty in footprint analyses is caused by the environmental data used in a GMRIO, followed by the size of country measured in gross domestic product (GDP) as fraction of the global total, the structure of the national table, and only at the end the structure of trade. We suggest the following to enhance robustness of results. In the short term, we recommend using the Single country National Accounts Consistent footprint approach, that uses official data for extensions and the national table for the country in question, combined with embodiments in imports calculated using a GMRIO. In a time period of 2 to 3 years, we propose work on harmonized environmental data for water, carbon, materials, and land, and use the aggregated Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Inter-Country Input-Output GMRIO as default in combination with detailing procedures developed in, for example, the EXIOBASE and Eora projects. In the long term, solutions should be coordinated by the international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) Statistical Division, OECD, and Eurostat. This could ensure that when input-output tables and trade data of individual countries are combined, that the global totals are consistent and that bilateral trade asymmetries are resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper serves as an introduction to this special issue on the use of multiregional inputoutput modeling in assessments of natural resource use and resource use efficiency. Due to globalization, growth in trade has outpaced growth in global gross domestic product (GDP). As a consequence, impacts of consumption of a country increasingly take place abroad. Various methods have been developed to perform so-called footprint analyses. We argue that global multiregional input-output (GMRIO) analysis has the largest potential to provide a consistent accounting framework to calculate a variety of different footprint indicators. The state of the art in GMRIO has, however, various shortcomings, such as limited sector and regional detail and incomplete extensions. The work presented in this special issue addresses a number of such problems and how to possibly overcome them, focusing on the construction of a new GMRIO database (EXIOBASE V3). This database includes long time series in both current and constant prices, a high level of product and sector detail, a physical representation of the world economy, and allows analyzing which footprints out of the many possible indicators provide most information for policy making. Various options for empirical analyses are presented in this special issue. Finally, we analyze how GMRIOs can be further standardized and gradually moved from the scientific to the official statistical domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in two provinces of southern Thailand, Nakhon Si Thammarat and Phatthalung in 2015 and 2016, this paper engages with literature on the politics of scale to consider the relationships among the practice of growing rubber and regional belonging. In many ways decoupling low rubber prices (at the time of writing) from a larger story of substantial, multinational increases in rubber cultivation and production since the early 2000s, a common calculus in southern Thailand among smallholder rubber farmers, or chao suan yang in Thai, of current price woes points in large measure to past policy moves by the Thai government, and especially under the administration of Thaksin Shinawatra in the mid‐2000s, to promote rubber cultivation into northern and northeastern provinces. I contend that emphasis given to such a regional‐national, in other words Thai, story of declines in rubber prices entails noteworthy moments of translation whereby rubber's scales are reconstru(ct)ed through appeals to regional legacies and perceptions of a transmission of ‘southern Thai rubber’ outside of the south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the value-generating strategies used in some of New Zealand's primary activities in a rapidly changing trading context in which the countries of East Asia increasingly figure. These strategies range from scaling up volume, with a consequent conspicuous impact on rural landscapes, to innovative value-enhancing relationships linking producers, processors and consumers in processes which value landscapes for the contribution they make to provenance stories. Our argument is that higher-value strategies are necessarily more intensely collaborative and involve a pursuit of engaged relationships, especially between onshore producers and manufacturers and consumers at a distance. We term this collaborative form of strategising as 'the relationships economy'. We illustrate our argument using two case studies, dairying and merino. While there are great differences in scale between them, and dairying focuses significantly on volume-generating capacity, there are players in dairying who are adopting higher-value relationships-based approaches similar to those developed in the merino industry. The common thread connecting the case studies is that of intentional enactment, which echoes earlier periods in New Zealand's trading history when considerable work was undertaken by industry participants to create new markets for primary products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation processes in emerging economies tend to differ from those in developed countries in that a larger share of firms absorb existing knowledge. The paper assesses how firms' absorptive capacity mediates the impact of global value chains on the innovation of handicraft exports in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The study draws three conclusions. First, the incremental innovation of craft exporters demands specific but rather mundane absorptive capacities of firms, such as language abilities and capable departments. Second, and contrary to what might be expected, the study finds that the governance modes of global value chains do not significantly affect the level of innovation. Third, a group of traders have the highest level of innovation, the highest level of absorptive capacity, and they positively affect the innovation of suppliers. Overall, the findings show that knowledge diffusion is furthered within an emerging local innovation system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop an endogenous growth and international trade model with two countries in which equilibrium wages in the two countries are different between two countries. First, when trade costs are high, the share of manufacturing firms in the large country increases with a decline in trade costs because of market size. However, the share of firms then decreases with a decline in trade costs when trade costs are low because of wage differences. Finally, all firms agglomerate in the small country, since production costs in the small country are low. In this process, the innovation sector shifts its location from the large-market and high-wage country to the small-market and low-wage country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, China and North Korea have been described as 'blood brothers' because of their common socialist ideological ground. Since 2000 the basis of their relationship has shifted from one-sided economic support by China into strategic and mutual cooperation. In this paper, we analyse changes in their relationship by examining two specific points: first, China's growing investment and trade in North Korea, and second, close linkages of regional development strategies between the two countries. While the prevalent discussions around North Korea and its relations with China concentrate on geopolitical issues, this research shed more light on geoeconomic engagement between China and North Korea. This paper argues that it is crucial to grasp how China and North Korea perform geoeconomic calculations toward each other and how this affects geopolitical conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Summer Olympics bring hundreds of thousands of visitors and generate upward of $10 billion in spending for the host city. This large influx of tourism dollars is only part of the overall impact of hosting the Olympic Games. In order to host the visitors and sporting events, cities must make sizable investments in infrastructure such as airports, arenas, and highways. Additionally, the publicity and international exposure of a host city may benefit international trade and capital flows. Proponents argue that this investment will pay off through increased economic growth, but research confirming these claims is lacking. This paper examines whether hosting an Olympiad improves a city's long-term growth. In order to control for the self-selection of cities that host Olympic Games, this paper matches Olympic host cities with cities that were finalists for the Olympic Games, but were not selected by the International Olympic Committee. A difference-in-difference estimator examines post-Olympic impacts for host cities between 1950 and 2005. Regression results provide no long-term impacts of hosting an Olympics on two measures of population, real Gross Domestic Product per capita and trade openness. ( JEL O18, R11) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's relationship with Africa has grown exponentially over the last decade with US$95 billion in bilateral trade in 2008 and US$5.4 billion of Chinese investment in Africa for the same year. The growth of Sino-African relations also has an impact on the role of traditional development partners in Africa in particular in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which has already led some traditional development partners to reduce their aid budgets and subsequently their Official Development Assistance (ODA) flows to Africa. The objective of this paper is to analyse different development cooperation modalities in Africa of traditional development partners and China. This requires identifying trends in aid, debt relief, general budget support, trade, preferential trade access, and investment flows of both traditional development partners and China. The paper advocates that complementarities can be built between these development modalities on a national, regional and global level. This would enhance development effectiveness, increase efficiency and create win-win situations which would be beneficial to African countries, China and traditional development partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pacific Asia has looked to direct foreign investment (DFI) to achieve economic growth and technological catch-up, and Japanese multinational corporations (MNCs) have responded massively. This paper evaluates Japanese MNCs as a source of industrial learning and technological transfer in the region, drawing from a large research literature and from the authors’ own surveys of Japanese DFI in the electronics sector. Japan's historic learning-based approach to industrialisation is captured by the flying geese metaphor of structural transformation. As an explanation of the transfer of technological know-how from Japan to Pacific Asia, however, the flying geese model is problematical. This paper reflects on the effectiveness, problems and dilemmas of Japanese MNCs in transferring such know-how to the region from a political economy perspective summarised as a ‘reverse product cycle model’. This model portrays DFI as a ‘bargain’ between Japanese MNCs and host countries, and which becomes more difficult to negotiate as DFI moves from low-skilled manufacturing to more innovative activities. The bases for this hypothesis relate to the increased complexity of industrial know-how and the conflicting motivations between MNCs and host countries in early stages of the product life cycle. In practice, however, this ‘bargain’ has developed differently among Asian countries, and we illustrate these differences by comparing the experiences of South Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we show that the existing low estimates of the cost of protection have failed to consider altogether or inappropriately the effects on the cost of protection of economic growth and the historic expansion of world trade at a rate greater than real output. We argue that if such growth is incorporated into models of the cost of protection, the net present value of costs readily becomes very large. The paper follows the basic approach used by M. Feldstein [1979], who showed that in a growing world the welfare cost of any steady rate of inflation approaches infinity as long as the rate of economic growth exceeds the discount rate.
We review the traditional estimates of the cost of protection. They are shown to provide extremely low estimates in a static analytical framework. We then argue that the cost of protection grows at the rate at which international trade expands because it prevents exploitation of the opportunity for gains from trade growing at that rate. In the post-war years trade has grown much more rapidly than real output. The growth-rate is also much greater than any of the commonly used rates of social discount. It therefore follows that the present value of the cost of protection is very large. Precise estimates depend on the length of protection and the size of any social benefits it provides. While no empirical estimates are presented, the analytical approach suggests a way for resolving what many economists perceive to be the puzzle of existing estimates of extremely low costs of protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a significant focus in the literature on growth and development on the idea that legal and political institutions are the key determinant of economic development. The main finding of this paper is that the focus on the primacy of legal and political institutions may be misplaced and that business-friendly economic policies (proxied for here by the World Bank's Doing Business indicator) are the key determinant of the level of income per capita. We find that a country's Doing Business rank dominates a range of measures of legal and political institutional quality as an explanatory variable for income per capita. We also find the Doing Business rank to be a key explanatory variable for economic growth and that previous findings assigning a significant role to educational attainment are not robust to the inclusion of this new indicator in growth regressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers first identified aquaculture as an important field of study during the 1990s, pointing to a 'net deficit' in geographical knowledge about the activity. This paper examines how far geographers have come in bridging this knowledge deficit in the last 20 years. While increasing attention has focused on the political economy of export products consumed in the global North, 'everyday' geographies of aquaculture production and consumption in the global South have been neglected. We argue that paying greater attention to everyday aquaculture in the global South provides opportunities for geographers to engage with wider questions around development and change that extend far beyond aquaculture. By focusing on changing patterns of aquaculture production for Southern domestic markets, geographers can provide a counterpoint to Northern dominated agro-food studies by re-emphasising the importance of consumption, urbanisation and agrarian transitions from a more place-based perspective and, in doing so, support the development of theory that reflects Southern realties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the dynamics of growth in the countries of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), focusing on external trade, in particular with China. Its aim is to shed light on the increasing influence of China in Africa. It uses dynamic panel estimations to measure the impact of trade orientation on economic growth in the CEMAC countries and concludes that specialization in natural resources affects economic growth negatively. But this effect is somewhat mitigated by the orientation towards China. Moreover, the weak intraregional trade between CEMAC countries has failed to contribute to their economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that while the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been successful in fostering trade between the parties and in serving as a model for subsequent free trade agreements, it has not realised its potential. This results from the free trade format itself as well as the unwillingness of the parties to go beyond the free trade format and their refusal to deal with new trade and security issues within NAFTA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the global financial and economic crisis, China has continued to experience strong export-driven growth and, indeed, became the world's largest exporting country in 2009. This rise of China in international markets presents African countries with growing competition in their home and export markets, but also with new opportunities. This paper focuses on the impacts of these developments on countries in North Africa, which are directly affected by the prominence of Chinese manufacturing. In particular, the analysis addresses two policy questions: First, is competition from China leading to substantial displacement of resources that incur significant adjustment costs while moving to new activities, or are there opportunities to exploit finer patterns of specialization that entail less disruption? And second, will policies that mitigate the impact of competition from China limit the longer-term capacity to exploit new opportunities in the global market? The findings from the empirical analysis suggest that policy makers can support North African producers in the increasingly fierce competition with China by reviewing the regulatory and incentives environment, reducing trade logistics costs, and broadening trade promotion efforts to non-traditional markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of contemporary pressures on industrial districts and analyses the changes that are taking place in an industrial district confronted with disembedding and globalisation. We discuss the following questions: What are the processes and consequences of disembedding for the changing shape and form of inter-firm trust, contract and network forms? Is there an evolution in subcontracting and trade interdependency? What is the role of institutional infrastructures? We performed a longitudinal qualitative study using a number of different data sources to analyse the evolution of one French industrial district, particularly how new pressures of internationalisation and disembedding work to reconfigure inter-firm relations in this district. While the recent literature is dominated by notions about industrial districts that concern only the trend towards increased competition or disembeddedness, this article shows that there is no unilinear trend. In contrast with the findings of certain recent studies, we argue that economic logic does not fully account for recent developments because the adjustment that are being made by the district are characterised rather by re-embeddedness, increased cooperation, and institutionalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature concerning regional development has placed significant emphasis on local institutional structures and their capacity to‘hold down’ the global. Conversely, work on inter-firm networks– such as the global commodity chain approach– has highlighted the significance of the organizational structures of global firms’ production systems and their relation to industrial upgrading. In this paper, drawing upon a global production networks perspective, we conceptualize the connections between‘globalizing’ processes, as embodied in the production networks of transnational corporations, and regional development in specific territorial formations. We delimit the‘strategic coupling’ of the global production networks of firms and regional economies which ultimately drives regional development through the processes of value creation, enhancement and capture. In doing so, we stress the multi-scalarity of the forces and processes underlying regional development, and thus do not privilege one particular geographical scale. By way of illustration, we introduce an example drawn from recent research into global production networks in East Asia and Europe. The example profiles the investments of car manufacturer BMW in Eastern Bavaria, Germany and Rayong, Thailand, and considers their implications for regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the relationship between FDI and economic growth in eight transition countries - EU candidates - in the period 1994-2001. Surprisingly, statistically robust negative causal relationship between FDI and growth emerged implying that FDI hampered their real convergence with EU. This result can be explained by the form of FDI. In the observed period, acquisitions were the predominant form and the proceeds of the sales were spent on consumption and imports rather than enhancing productive assets. Indeed, current account and FDI were strongly linked; the bigger the inflow of FDI into a country, the higher its current account deficit and foreign debt. Small size of the host countries and concentration of FDI in trade and finance could weaken productivity spillovers while increased efficiency of the acquired firm could be more than offset by the reduction of economic links with local firms. FDI would also not automatically increase competition as it could force small emerging local competitors out of business. While foreign trade increased through FDI, multinationals contributed more to imports than to exports. Finally, while FDI might support human capital formation, this type of spillovers simply does not seem to be very relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to reconcile social and environmental goals for sustainable development still poses problems for policy makers in the richer parts of the world. Using the examples of domestic water and energy, this paper argues that the problems are reflected, and often magnified, in developing countries. They arise largely from conflicts between the short-term need to alleviate poverty and longer-term objectives for environmental sustainability. The dual nature of water and energy as both social and economic goods raises questions about the most appropriate forms of provision and allocation of the utilities. It is in no one's long-term interest for developing countries to repeat the environmentally damaging mistakes of the industrialized world. But an equitable distribution of the short-term costs attached to a more environmentally responsible use of resources demands new ways of thinking about global social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The propositions implicit in the Washington Consensus can be stated as follows: development is assimilated to limitless economic growth; the goal of social progress is reduced to a mere "trickle-down" effect; the widest possible engagement in international trade is seen as the fundamental prerequisite for development; the role of the state is subordinate to that of the market; in short, there exists, or so it is maintained, one single model of rational development. This paper is devoted to a preliminary discussion of the first of the above principles. It seeks first to show the extent to which growth is indeed the centre-piece of development strategies, setting out the arguments traditionally advanced in favour of its pre-eminence, with its concomitant requirement for limitless expansion of commodity output. However, growth on this scale clearly seems not to be sustainable in the longer term -- hence the need to rethink where economic growth fits into long-term development aims and strategies and to take fuller account of the arguments, of an economic, social, and ecological nature, being put forward against this view of growth as limitless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1950 there has been a massive liberalization of world trade taking various forms including the formation of free trade areas, customs unions, unilateral reductions in tariff barriers, and reductions in non-tariff barriers to trade. To what extent has this liberalization contributed to the growth performance of countries, and what are the mechanisms through which faster export growth may impact favourably on economic growth? The paper first surveys the empirical literature which seems to show that countries that participate in regional trading agreements (RTAs) fare worse than countries which reduce tariffs unilaterally, and secondly comments on the theoretical literature relating to the mechanisms through which exports affect growth. It is argued that the orthodox neoclassical supply-side argument is only half the story, and much more emphasis needs to be placed on the effect of export performance in relaxing a balance of payments constraint on demand. Depuis 1950, le commerce mondial a connu une libéralisation considérable qui a pris diverses formes: formation de zones de libre-échange, d'unions douanières, abaissement unilatéral des barrières tarifaires et réduction des barrières non tarifaires. Dans quelle mesure cette libéralisation a-t-elle contribué à la croissance des pays et par quels mécanismes une expansion plus rapide des exportations peut-elle influencer positivement la croissance économique? Le document passe d'abord en revue le littérature empirique qui semble démontrer que les pays qui participent à des accords commerciaux régionaux (ACR) sont en pire posture que ceux qui abaissent unilatéralement les barrières tarifaires. Le document formule ensuite des observations sur la littérature théorique concernant les mécanismes par lesquels les exportations influent sur la croissance. Il so... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rapid economic growth and urbanization poses great challenges to urban transportation planners. Although most municipal governments have, since the mid-1980s, substantially increased their spending on urban transportation, the resulting infrastructure and service expansions have generally been outpaced by an explosive increase in travel demand. The problem is further complicated by the Chinese government's recent decision to adopt the automobile industry as a driving force for national economic development. This important new policy will dramatically increase the level of motorization and the demand for transportation facilities in China, especially in the urban areas of the coastal region. Unless appropriate policy actions are taken, the gap between supply arid demand in urban transportation will grow and eventually become a major obstacle to economic growth and improvement of quality of life. This paper discusses urban transportation problems and their planning implications in the case of Shanghai, China' s largest metropolis. As part of its national economic development strategy, the Chinese government is determined to develop Shanghai into a leading international center of finance and trade.

This article presents an overview of the recent development in the new economic geography (NEG), and discusses possible directions of its future development. Since several surveys on this topic already exist, we focus on the selected features of NEG which are important yet have attracted insufficient attention, and also on the recent refinements and extensions of the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]