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The Doha Development Agenda recognizes the central role that international trade can play in the promotion of economic development. In fact, the increase of exports from developing countries to developed nations' markets has been considered a key element for developing countries to realize the potential benefits of globalization. Over the last decades, developed countries have provided preferential access to their markets to developing countries through nonreciprocal trade agreements. Moreover, developing countries have also participated in reciprocal trade agreements. This paper re-examines comparatively the effect of both kinds of trade agreements on exports from developing countries but also from the developed world. In line with other studies, our results across specifications are unstable. However, the results of our preferred specification give additional support to the argument raised by critics of nonreciprocal preference regimes who consider that developing countries should abandon their reliance on one-way trade preferences in favor of reciprocal agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manufacturing in China has developed rapidly with the widening and deepening of globalization, but only innovation can industry keep upgrading and enhancing its international competitiveness. This paper combines Global Value Chains (GVCs) and National Value Chains (NVCs) in a unified theory framework, uses Structural Decomposition Analysis (SDA) to explore how innovation capacity, production capacity, and vertical specialization affect innovation performance from the supply and demand sides by examining the case of Electronic Manufacturing of China. We observe that innovation inputs and outputs present strong regional heterogeneity between coastal and inland regions. Although most regions continue to engage in processing trade or assembly manufacturing in GVCs, NVCs are gradually established and led by coastal regions. The results indicate a good chance for cultivating innovation capacity in coastal regions. After assessing the influence of determinants on innovation performance, we observe that from supply-side, innovation capacity has a positive effect on innovation performance, production capacity in coastal regions is improving, and domestic demand for domestic products is increasingly important. From the demand side, innovation capacity continues to have a positive effect on innovation performance, production capacity improves rapidly, and imported intermediate inputs enhance innovation performance more effectively than domestic intermediate inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature on internationalization, in relation to the absence of objective and measurable performance indicators for the process of how firms sequentially enter external markets. To that end, this research develops a quantitative tool for use as a performance indicator of gradualness for firms entering external markets at a sectoral level. The performance indicator is based on firms’ export volumes, number of years operating in the export market, geographic areas targeted for export and when exports began to each area. The indicator is tested empirically in the wine sector. The main contribution of this study is the creation of a reliable international priority index, which can serve more widely as a valuable tool because of its potential use in other industry sectors and geographic areas, and which would allow the analysis of how geographically differentiated internationalization strategies develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the context-sensitive nature of entrepreneurial orientation (EO), it is imperative to in-depth explore the EO-performance mechanism in China at its critical, specific stage of economic reform. Under the context of “reverse internationalization” by Chinese global startup original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), this paper aims to manifest the unique links and complicated interrelationships between the individual EO dimensions and firm performance. Using structural equation modeling, we found that during reverse internationalization, proactiveness is positively related to performance; risk taking is not statistically associated with performance; innovativeness is negatively related to performance. The proactiveness-performance relationship is mediated by Strategic flexibility and moderated by social networking relationships. The dynamic and complex institutional setting, coupled with the issues of overcapacity and rising labor cost in China may explain why our distinctive results occur. This research advances the understanding of how contingent factors (social network relationships and strategic flexibility) facilitate entrepreneurial firms to break down institutional barriers and reap the most from EO. It brings new insights into how Chinese global startup OEMs draw on EO to undertake reverse internationalization, responding the calls for unraveling the heterogeneous characteristics of EO sub-dimensions and for more contextually-embedded treatment of EO-performance associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The malaria disease has become a cause of poverty and a major hindrance to economic development. The culprit of the disease is the parasite, which secretes an array of proteins within the host erythrocyte to facilitate its own survival. Accordingly, the secretory proteins of malaria parasite have become a logical target for drug design against malaria. Unfortunately, with the increasing resistance to the drugs thus developed, the situation has become more complicated. To cope with the drug resistance problem, one strategy is to timely identify the secreted proteins by malaria parasite, which can serve as potential drug targets. However, it is both expensive and time-consuming to identify the secretory proteins of malaria parasite by experiments alone. To expedite the process for developing effective drugs against malaria, a computational predictor called "iSMP-Grey" was developed that can be used to identify the secretory proteins of malaria parasite based on the protein sequence information alone. During the prediction process a protein sample was formulated with a 60D (dimensional) feature vector formed by incorporating the sequence evolution information into the general form of PseAAC (pseudo amino acid composition) via a grey system model, which is particularly useful for solving complicated problems that are lack of sufficient information or need to process uncertain information. It was observed by the jackknife test that iSMP-Grey achieved an overall success rate of 94.8%, remarkably higher than those by the existing predictors in this area. As a user-friendly web-server, iSMP-Grey is freely accessible to the public at http://www.jci-bioinfo.cn/iSMP-Grey. Moreover, for the convenience of most experimental scientists, a step-by-step guide is provided on how to use the web-server to get the desired results without the need to follow the complicated mathematical equations involved in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]