With Rasmus Lema and Carlo Pietrobelli I have contributed to the Handbook on Global Value Chains with a chapter presenting a new conceptual framework for investigating how GVCs and ISs jointly contribute to innovation in developing countries. It can be downloaded here.
This paper, co-authored with Vito Amendolagine, Andrea Presbitero and Marco Sanfilippo and published in World Development, investigates whether and how participation and positioning in the global value chains (GVCs) of host countries is associated to local sourcing by foreign investors in 19 Sub-Saharan African countries and Vietnam. The article is open source and can be downloaded here.
Chinese and Indian multinationals are continuously expanding their operations in Europe and the USA through cross-border acquisitions (CBAs), with the aim of tapping into international knowledge located in target firms and innovative hubs. In this article published in the Journal of Economic Geography with Amendolagine, Giuliani and Martinelli, we look into the innovative impacts that CBAs have on the acquiring multinational enterprises.
In this article co-authored with Rasmus Lema and Padmashree Sampath, we investigate how combining global value chain and innovation system approaches can help to foster an understanding of the possible trajectories that learning and innovation may take in developing countries.
Free download here
With Valentina De Marchi and Elisa Giuliani I published an article in the European Journal of Development Research. The paper offers s a systematic review of the literature on developing country GVCs to investigate the learning channels used by local firms, both within (firm level, collective level) and outside of these value chains (i.e. external sources of learning), and the extent to which this activity promotes innovation.
Here there is a free to view link to the article
With Vito Amendolagine I have contributed to this book edited by Jan Drahokoupil and published by ETUI with a chapter on Chinese Foreign Direct Investments in the European Union.
Here you can download the full book and here is the link to my chapter.
With Winston Moore and Andrea Presbitero I have contributed to this book with a chapter on The Gender Gap in the Caribbean: The Performance of Women-Led Firms. The paper shows that women-managed firms are in fact less productive than other comparable firms.
Here you can download our chapter and here is the link to an infographic.
With Elisa Giuliani, I have published a CERTeT WP on Italian industrial districts (IDs). In this paper we use the available empirical evidence on these recent transformations, and elaborate a novel typology of Italian ID organizational models (i.e. lowroad IDs, locally rooted GVC-led IDs, and outward oriented GVC-led IDs).
Here you can download the working paper
With Elisa Giuliani, I have published a IADB Discussion Paper discussing clusters in the Caribbean. A desk review of 32 clusters distributed across the Caribbean identifying three groups of clusters are identified: rising, innovative, and sluggish.
The working paper is available here
In this article co-authored with Andrea Morrison, we investigate the different catch-up cycles in the global wine sector between 1960 and 2010. Changes in demand opened the first window of opportunity for latecomers, who gradually caught up via path-creating strategies. Incumbents maintained their leadership by aligning their wines to current demand patterns. The entry of China in the wine market can open up a new catch-up cycle.
We empirically analyse the host country determinants of Chinese outward foreign direct investments (FDI) for the years 2003 to 2011, using disaggregated data by country and industry. Our aim is to assess the relevance of market seeking, resource seeking and strategic asset-seeking motivations as suggested by the theory on host country determinants of FDI.
The Innovation Systems (IS) literature tends not to emphasize the crucial impact of international knowledge and innovation exchange and collaboration through, for example, inter-firm and intra-firm networks and Global Value Chains (GVC). In developing countries this aspect is crucial, with integration in GVC playing a growing and very important role in accessing knowledge and enhancing learning and innovation.