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In this paper, we analyze the evolution of China's production structure. Through the use of a subsystem approach and world input-output tables, we assess the role played by domestic and foreign final demand in the Chinese manufacturing subsystem. The results indicate that the importance of domestic demand has increased since the years of the crisis, forming a U-shape over the period. The dependence on foreign demand remains crucial for high-tech subsystems, and the medium high-tech subsystems are central to the growth of domestic demand. In addition, final demand and labor intensity play a significant role in employment growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our article presents an empirical investigation of the relationship between the export performance of Italian provinces and the quality of their local institutions, specifically the rule of law, over the period 2004–2016. According to the results obtained by different econometric approaches (OLS, FE, SYS-GMM), in general a secure and well-defined legal framework – by reducing transaction costs and uncertainty, facilitating capital accumulation and an increase in the firms' scale of production – is associated with better export performance. Interestingly, when the analysis is replicated at the level of the Italian macro-areas (North, Centre and South), the results indicate that the rule of law has a statistically significant and positive association with export performance only in northern provinces, thus suggesting that the effectiveness of this institutional dimension might depend on the level of development of the socioeconomic and institutional features at the local level, i.e. only when a set of suitable economic incentive mechanisms are already in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a novel take on the relationship between migration and regional innovation by analysing the impact of both international and internal migration flows across Italian provinces, by skill level, and on three types of intellectual property rights (IPRs), namely patents, trademarks and design rights. Allowing us to capture innovation beyond technology and high-tech manufacturing, our results shed light on the relationship between different types of migrant human capital and this array of innovative outcomes. Focusing on Italian provinces in the period 2003–2012, our empirical analysis reveals that internal migration is more significantly related to innovation than international migration. Moreover, medium- and high-skilled migrants are positively associated with all three types of IPRs, while low-skilled migration has a negative association. There are also significant differences across provinces, with a clear distinction between the more economically developed Northern provinces and the rest of Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides new empirical evidence on the transformation of the structure of production in the Visegrád (V4) countries—the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia—using a multi‐regional version of the subsystem approach to global input‐output tables. In particular, the paper analyses structural change in these countries, with a focus on the integration of market services in manufacturing. Moreover, using an input‐output structural decomposition analysis (SDA), we evaluate the role of some key determinants of employment changes in manufacturing. The results indicate that an increasing amount of intermediate demand comes from producer services. Further, a substantial portion of manufacturing employment is generated by foreign final demand, and the SDA demonstrates that labour intensity and final demand play a determining role in the change in the number of hours worked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to provide new findings on the extent of the deindustrialisation process by adopting a new subsystem approach. In particular, we have extended the subsystem approach in a multi-country setting using world input-output tables. An empirical investigation is carried out on the four largest eurozone countries based on the World Input-Output Database (WIOD). The results show the substantial fall in labour intensity of production, rather than a real decline in manufacturing. We establish a series of facts concerning deindustrialisation. First, international fragmentation of inter-industry linkages has rapidly increased. Second, a pervasive process of falling employment has been influenced by decline in domestic demand. Third, the direction of this change is driven by the technological and innovative intensity of subsystems. Fourth, we show increasing specialisation in producer services within the manufacturing subsystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article empirically explores the role of e-business digital technologies in explaining the export propensity of Italian SMEs and focuses on the adoption and implementation of e-business technologies that enable firms to share information along the supply chain in order to take into account potential heterogeneities in paths of digitalisation. Our results, besides confirming the positive role of internet-based technologies already investigated in the current literature, show that e-business technologies have a positive impact on internationalisation only when they are embedded within process and organisational innovations and investments in digital skills have been made. This indirectly supports the argument that as the array of technological choices increases, the need for concurrent internal changes, as well as a detailed assessment of the connectedness between technological alternatives and specific business types, industries, or trading environment become increasingly important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A recent literature strand has emphasized the importance of international migration on the institutional quality of sending and receiving countries. On the contrary, there is no evidence of the effects of intra‐national, interregional mobility on government quality, a phenomenon which is particularly relevant in countries affected by significant internal dualism. Using a system generalized method of moments (SYS‐GMM) estimator on a 2004–2012 panel dataset, this paper empirically investigates the relationship between internal net‐migration and institutional quality of Italian provinces. The findings show that migration has a relevant and positive effect on the quality of institutions only when the human capital content is taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the survey ‘Aspects of daily life’ conducted on Italian individuals in 2014 by the Italian Institute of Statistics, we propose new evidence on the factors that encourage the adoption of fixed broadband, a topic relevant for the reduction of the so-called broadband demand gap. We estimate a probit model through the two-step Heckman procedure for the selection bias, and find that, besides the already studied socio-demographic determinants, Internet-capable devices other than personal computers, as well as recreational (essentially video contents) and cloud-related uses of the Internet, have a relevant positive role. Policies aimed at fostering the diffusion of smart homes and more generally of the Internet of things at the residential level might be very effective in favouring fixed broadband adoption, provided that the network be neutral, not discriminating between data based on their contents and/or the destination device, and that possible foreclosing behaviours in the access to (premium) contents be properly and promptly addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between tertiary activities and productivity growth has been extensively studied over the past decades. Research has shown that, within tertiary activities, distributive services play a key role in this dynamic. This framework overturns the traditional view of services as unproductive activities, usually responsible for a structural burden that slows down the evolutionary dynamics of the economic system. Given the slow pace with which the process of modernization of services is moving forward, Italy seems to be making an important exception to this general conclusion. It should be noted that empirical research that approached this problem in the past was usually based on data at the national level. Such an approach does not consider the strong heterogeneity that usually exists between territorial clusters within a nation. In order to overcome such limitations, this paper focuses on the impact of distributive services on productivity growth at the local level, using the Italian industrial districts as a unit of analysis. The results show that in industrial districts the growth of the employment share of distributive services is the consequence of a positive integration with the industrial activities. In the industrial districts, in addition, distributive services make a positive contribution to the productivity growth of the whole economy and to the productivity growth of the industrial sector, confirming that no structural burden seems to be at work. On the contrary, non-district manufacturing areas do not show such positive trends, thus confirming the existence of a district effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]