Anatomy of Green Specialisation: Evidence from EU Production Data, 1995–2015

We study green specialisation across EU countries and detailed 4-digit industrial sectors over the period of 1995–2015 by harmonizing product-level data (PRODCOM). We propose a new list of green goods that refines lists proposed by international organizations by excluding goods with double usage. Our analysis reveals important structural characteristics of green specialisation in the manufacturing sector. First, green production is highly concentrated, with 13 out of 119 4-digit industries, which are high-tech and account for nearly 95% of the total. Second, green and polluting productions do not occur in the same sectors, and countries specialise in either green or brown sectors. Third, our econometric analysis identifies three key features as relevant for green specialisation: (i) first-mover advantage and high persistence of green specialisation, (ii) complementarity with non-green capabilities and (iii) the degree of diversification of green capabilities

Revisiting the natural resource ‘curse’ in the context of trade in value added: enclave or high-development backward linkages?

This paper puts forward and empirically tests the conjecture that specialisation in Natural Resource Industries (NRI) might not necessarily be a ‘curse’ for (developing) countries, if it provides opportunities for export diversification in backward linked sectors à la Hirschman. We first revisit the evolution of the debate around the NRI ‘curse’, including those from scholars sceptical of diversification based on beneficiation from NRI. We then empirically test whether NRI might represent a sufficient “domestic representative demand” à la Linder for backward linked sectors such as Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) or high tech manufacturing that might provide new opportunities for export diversification led by virtuous pathways of domestic structural change. We find empirical support for this conjecture and discuss some implications that revisit the NRI curse debate

Moving up the value chain with South-South cooperation for trade and technology? An analysis of India's trade with East Africa

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an early assessment of India’s South-South cooperation for trade and technology (SSTT) with East Africa, focusing on Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It aims to analyse the role of SSTT in providing support to targeted sectors. Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines SSTT, focusing on India and East Africa over a specific period (2000–2016) of its emergence, and extends the public sponsorship literature in international business (IB) to better understand the relationship between SSTT and value addition – applying to a particular case study of SSTT interventions in spices. Findings – The paper highlights SSTT as a pathway to support value addition in global value chains (GVCs). Trade between India and East African countries has grown, with three developments over the period of analysis in particular: shifting trade patterns, growing share of intermediate goods trade and differences in GVC insertion. However, East African exports are largely of lower value. Capacity building to support processing capability and thriving markets can encourage greater value addition. Preliminary findings suggest early gains at the margins, as SSTT interventions have been focusing on capacity boosting with buffering and bridging mechanisms for increased volume of trade. Moving up the value chain however requires that specific value-enhancing activities continue to be targeted, building on regional capacities. Our high-level case study for spices suggests that activities are starting to have a positive effect; however, more focus is needed to specifically target value creation before export and in particular higher levels of processing. Practical implications – While findings are preliminary, policy implications emerge to guide SSTT interventions. There is capacity for building higher value-added supply chains as is evident among East African countries that trade with each other – future SSTT programmes could tap into this and help build capacity in these higher-value value chains. Future SSTT programmes can take a comprehensive approach by aiming at interventions at key points of the value chain, and especially at points that facilitate higher value addition than initial processing. An example is that Ethiopia and Rwanda are likely to benefit from an expanded spice industry, but the next phase should be towards building processing for value-addition components of the value chain, such as through trade policies, incentivising exporters to add value to items before export. From a development perspective, more analysis needs to be done on the value chain itself – for instance, trade facilitation measures to help processers engage in value chains and to access investments for increasing value add activities. (iv), Future research should examine more closely the development impacts of SSTT, namely, the connection between increased trade, local job creation and sustained innovation, as it is these tangible benefits that will help countries in the Global South realise the benefits of increased trade. Originality/value – The paper underlines how the SSTT approach can contribute to the critical IB and GVCs literature using a theoretical grounded approach from public sponsorship theory, and with a unique lens of development cooperation between countries in the global south and its emerging impact on development outcomes in these countries

Trade and economic development in global value chains: insights from input-output analysis and customs transaction level data

The thesis explores how the fragmentation of production and the subsequent emergence of Global Value Chains (GVCs) have changed countries’ and firms’ chances to benefit from international trade and attain economic development. In the first Chapter we use inter-country input-output (ICIO) tables from the OECD and WTO to revisit the role of trade specialisation taking a value added, rather than gross export, approach that allows to identify countries’ domestic contribution to trade specialisation and export performance. I explore these issues implementing the generalised method of moments (GMM) to estimate an autoregressive model. In doing this, we contribute to the literature on trade in value added, as well as on structural change and the role of manufacturing for economic growth. We find that natural resources are not, unsurprisingly, a beneficial specialisation pattern. Specialisation in manufacturing has a different effect depending on the technology level; lowtech manufacturing seems to exert a negative effect on countries trade performance. In contrast, high-tech manufacturing and knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) do not have strong negative effects in the long run, while we detect a positive effect during the years of the crisis. The second paper explores a related issue, focusing in particular on the relationship between domestic backward linkages and export in value added. Taking stock on the findings of the first paper, with natural resources as a detrimental specialisation pattern, we assess whether backward linkages emanating from this sector can spur export in other sectors, namely hightech manufacturing and KIBS. We use the same data as the first Chapter and also implement a system GMM, finding that a large intermediate domestic demand from the natural resource sector has a positive effect on the export of domestic value added of both KIBS and high-tech manufacturing. These results are strong and significant both for the mining and the agriculture sectors. One of the main policy implications of these results is that countries with a large endowment in natural resources can foster domestic backward linkages to pursue export diversification. Finally, the third Chapter studies the linkages in GVCs at the buyer-supplier level exploring how buyer supplier relationships can affect exporters capabilities in Colombia. We combine three datasets: one with information on buyer-suppliers matches, from the Colombian Customs, a second dataset with the financial statement of the exporters and a third one the complexity of the traded products computed by the Atlas of Complexity compiled by Harvard University. We then construct measures of market power and buyer-supplier dependence to study how these are related to the complexity of each relationship and the capabilities of the Colombian exporters. In line with the growing literature on trade and firm heterogeneity, we find that complex buyers tend to engage with complex suppliers, trading a larger number of products than less complex buyer-supplier pairs. Moreover, we find that the buyer’s market power and the buyer-supplier mutual dependence are associated with a higher complexity of the products traded, suggesting that large buyers in intense relationship tend to favour suppliers’ efforts for product upgrading. These results lend support to the well-established literature on GVCs, confirming that power relationships are related to exporters’ performance, especially in terms of sophistication. We contribute to this literature by offering a quantitative approach that relies on administrative data, rather than surveys and distinguishes different kinds of power, based on its source; within this framework we show that different kinds of power are associated with different export outcomes

Technology, global value chains and functional specialisation in Europe

This paper provides empirical evidence on the role of technology in affecting the relationship between the participation of EU countries and industries in Global Value Chains (GVCs) and their employment structure over the period 2000–2014. The empirical analysis is based on country-sector level data for 21 EU countries on employment, trade in value added, patents and investments in intangible assets, and focusses on backward linkages within GVCs. The role of technology is analysed by taking into account both the technological intensity of country-sectors participating in GVC and that of their GVC partners. We study the employment structure by looking at the shares of managers and manual workers, which reflect the “functional specialisation” of the country-sector within GVCs. We find that participation in GVC per se is not related to the employment structure of a country-sector. We show that different patterns of GVC integration and functional specialisation emerge that depend on the initial patents/intangibles intensity of the country-sector integrating in GVC and those of the partners

Nearshoring and Farsharing in Europe within the Global Economy

We distinguish the geographical source and destination of value added contributed by each country-industry to each country-global-value-chain (GVC) from both input sourcing and output destination perspectives. We define indicators that capture the relative intensity of regional vis-à-vis global (i.e., extra-regional) components of foreign value added and employment. Europe is increasingly sourcing value added from within the region (“nearshoring”) but exporting value added globally (“farsharing”) European GVCs mostly generate foreign employment outside Europe. In contrast, most of European employment is activated by European GVCs: an important labor market policy implication arguing for more intensive intra-EU trade and integration. Europe and its economic policy should not only focus on the sourcing of value added across production processes, but also on the final demand that generates economic activity in Europe

Anti-HBs re-seroconversion after liver transplantation in a patient with past HBV infection receiving a HBsAg positive graft

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Synergistic Proapoptotic Activity of Recombinant Trail Plus the AKT Inhibitor Perifosine in Acute Myelogenous Leukemia Cells

To potentiate the response of acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) cells to TNF-Related Apoptosis- Inducing Ligand (TRAIL) cytotoxicity, we have examined the efficacy of a combination with perifosine, a novel phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt signaling inhibitor. The rationale for using such a combination is that perifosine was recently described to increase TRAIL-R2 receptor expression and decrease the cellular FLICE-Inhibitory Protein (cFLIP) in human lung cancer cell lines. Perifosine and TRAIL both induced cell death by apoptosis in the THP-1 AML cell line, which is characterized by constitutive PI3K/Akt activation, but lacks functional p53. Perifosine, at concentrations below IC50, dephosphorylated Akt and increased TRAIL-R2 levels, as demonstrated by western blot, RT-PCR, and flow cytometric analysis. Perifosine also decreased the long isoform of cFLIP (cFLIP-L) and the X-linked Inhibitor of Apoptosis Protein (XIAP) expression. Perifosine and TRAIL synergized to activate caspase-8 and induce apoptosis, which was blocked by a caspase- 8 selective inhibitor. Upregulation of TRAIL-R2 expression was dependent on a protein kinase Cα/ c-Jun-NH2-kinase 2/c-Jun signaling pathway activated by perifosine through reactive oxygen species production. Perifosine synergized with TRAIL also in primary AML cells displaying constitutive activation of the Akt pathway, by inducing apoptosis, Akt dephosphorylation, TRAIL-R2 upregulation, cFLIP-L and XIAP downregulation, and c-Jun phosphorylation. The combined treatment negatively affected the clonogenic activity of CD34+ cells from AML patients. In contrast, CD34+ cells from healthy donors were resistant to perifosine and TRAIL treatment. Our findings suggest that the combination perifosine and TRAIL might offer a novel therapeutic strategy for AML. Originally published Cancer Research, Vol. 68, No. 22, Nov 200

Occurrence of Fatal and Nonfatal Adverse Outcomes after Heart Transplantation in Patients with Pretransplant Noncytotoxic HLA Antibodies

HLA antibodies (HLA ab) in transplant candidates have been associated with poor outcome. However, clinical relevance of noncytotoxic antibodies after heart transplant (HT) is controversial. By using a Luminex-based HLA screening, we retested pretransplant sera from HT recipients testing negative for cytotoxic HLA ab and for prospective crossmatch. Out of the 173 consecutive patients assayed (52±13y; 16% females; 47% ischemic etiology), 32 (18%) showed pretransplant HLA ab, and 12 (7%) tested positive against both class I and class II HLA. Recipients with any HLA ab had poorer survival than those without (65±9 versus 82±3%; P=0.02), accounting for a doubled independent mortality risk (P=0.04). In addition, HLA-ab detection was associated with increased prevalence of early graft failure (35 versus 15%; P=0.05) and late cellular rejection (29 versus 11%; P=0.03). Of the subgroup of 37 patients suspected for antibody mediated rejection (AMR), the 9 with pretransplant HLA ab were more likely to display pathological AMR grade 2 (P=0.04). By an inexpensive, luminex-based, HLA-screening assay, we were able to detect non-cytotoxic HLA ab predicting fatal and nonfatal adverse outcomes after heart transplant. Allocation strategies and desensitization protocols need to be developed and prospectively tested in these patients