Papers by Angelica Sbardella
Scientific reports, May 23, 2024
Journal of physics. Complexity, May 22, 2024
arXiv (Cornell University), Aug 14, 2023
Economic Complexity (EC) methods have gained increasing popularity across fields and disciplines.... more Economic Complexity (EC) methods have gained increasing popularity across fields and disciplines. In particular, the EC toolbox has proved particularly promising in the study of complex and interrelated phenomena, such as the transition towards a greener economy. Using the EC approach, scholars have been investigating the relationship between EC and sustainability, proposing to identify the distinguishing characteristics of green products and to assess the readiness of productive and technological structures for the sustainability transition. This article proposes to review and summarize the data, methods, and empirical literature that are relevant to the study of the sustainability transition from an EC perspective. We review three distinct but connected blocks of literature on EC and environmental sustainability. First, we survey the evidence linking measures of EC to indicators related to environmental sustainability. Second, we review articles that strive to assess the green competitiveness of productive systems. Third, we examine evidence on green technological development and its connection to non-green knowledge bases. Finally, we summarize the findings for each block and identify avenues for further research in this recent and growing body of empirical literature.
ILO Working Paper
Our study investigates the heterogeneity of skill demands within occupations, the firm activities... more Our study investigates the heterogeneity of skill demands within occupations, the firm activities that are associated with demand for broader skill sets, and the firm characteristics that are related to particular skills and different combinations of skills. We use a unique matched database of firm-level data and online job vacancy data for a developing economy, namely, India. Employing a multi-level machine learning technique and an innovative skill taxonomy, we identify and categorize skill requirements of firms. Our empirical analysis provides robust evidence of significant heterogeneity in skill requirements across firms within the same occupations. Additionally, we show that firms demanding diverse skills differ from their counterparts. Firms that are competitive in international markets, as well as those that are more innovative, require digital skills and specific combinations of digital and other skills. Our findings highlight the crucial role played by firms in defining the...
arXiv (Cornell University), Apr 11, 2023
Intereconomics
By means of a long-run analysis on electoral and inequality data, this article shows that there e... more By means of a long-run analysis on electoral and inequality data, this article shows that there exists a temporal correlation between inequalities and non-voting behaviour. Non-voting is progressively becoming a widespread phenomenon, beyond specific national contexts, and challenges the functioning of democracies in advanced capitalist countries. Notably, data on electoral results in Italy do not show a clear leading group of non-voters. Although historically concentrated in southern Italy and predominantly female, non-voters are proportionally increasing in the centre and in the north of the country, independently of the gender dimension. The root causes of the phenomenon should be traced back not only to the political and institutional dimension, but also to a widespread socioeconomic determinant, namely labour market inequality, the driver addressed in this article.
Research Papers in Economics, May 31, 2021
This paper is one of the first attempts at empirically identifying organisational capabilities-in... more This paper is one of the first attempts at empirically identifying organisational capabilities-in this work concerning Italian firms. Together, it proposes new evidence on the link between capabilities and economic performances. In order to do so, we employ the Indagine Multiscopo del Censimento Permanente delle Imprese (IMCPI), a survey carried out by the Italian Statistical Office (ISTAT) in 2019, covering the three-year period 2016-2018, addressing a wide range of organizational characteristics including various organizational routines, human resource management, internationalisation strategies and many others. Our contribution is threefold: first, we aim at detecting what practices and combinations of them result in underlying different capabilities; second, we propose a taxonomy of the production system, both at firm-and sector-level based on the mapping of such capabilities, third we study the performance outcomes of different capability-taxa in terms of productivity and employment growth.
We study the empirical relationship between green technologies and industrial production at very ... more We study the empirical relationship between green technologies and industrial production at very fine-grained levels by employing Economic Complexity techniques. Firstly, we use patent data on green technology domains as a proxy for competitive green innovation and data on exported products as a proxy for competitive industrial production. Secondly, with the aim of observing how green technological development trickles down into industrial production, we build a bipartite directed network linking single green technologies at time t 1 to single products at time t 2 ≥ t 1 on the basis of their time-lagged co-occurrences in the technological and industrial specialization profiles of countries. Thirdly, we filter the links in the network by employing a maximum entropy null-model. Our results emphasize a strong connection between green technologies and the export of products related to the processing of raw materials, notably crucial for the development of climate change mitigation and adaptation technologies. Furthermore, by looking at the evolution of the network over time, we observe a growing presence of more complex green technologies and high-tech products among the significant links, suggesting an increase in their importance in the network. The fight against climate change is at an unprecedented critical phase: the impact of human systems of production and consumption on the environment as well as the transition to a more sustainable economy are at the center of public attention and EU policy agenda 1-3. In this context, the development of green technologies, which despite being relatively at an early stage of the life cycle has shown a great acceleration over recent years 4 , might play a crucial role both towards containing and preventing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and in sustaining a shift towards less environmentally costly manufacturing processes 4-6. It is therefore of the greatest importance to investigate how green technologies are connected to the economy and, in particular, to industrial production. This is what motivates our paper. In particular, by adopting a complexity perspective, we aim at filling some gaps in the study of the interplay between green innovation and production by implementing a highly granular analysis that allows us to explore how individual green technologies unfold into industrial production. Several aspects of the nexus between export and green technological development have been examined at the aggregate level. By exploring different directions of causality at the firm, industry and country level, a wide array of studies has focused on the export-green innovation nexus generally highlighting a positive relationship between (policy/regulation induced) eco-innovations and export competitiveness/performance 7,8 , quality 9 , propensity 10 , or diversification 11 (for a review on the topic with a special focus on agrifood supply chains see Galera-Quiles et al. 12). However, previous research has largely looked at the link between overall green technological innovation and overall or sector specific export at highly aggregated levels-i.e., by focusing respectively on green patent counts and export volumes (or intensity/participation rates etc.)-overlooking the fact that a green technology may foster the export of a specific product or bundle of products, but this may not be true for all products, and a negative association with other exported goods could also be found. Accordingly, we propose a novel quantitative framework rooted in the Economic Complexity (EC) literature 13-15 that enables us to unpack the green innovation-export nexus by exploring how single green technological innovations, as proxied by patenting activity in climate change adaptation and mitigation technologies (CCMTs), trickle down into industrial production at the level of single products, as proxied by export data 16. Our approach is particularly relevant when looking at green technologies, because, as they encompass different
The goal of the paper is to elaborate an empirical overview of green technological development in... more The goal of the paper is to elaborate an empirical overview of green technological development in European regions. This is a timely pursuit considering the ambitious commitments stipulated in the recent European Green Deal to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Our analysis is organised in three steps. First, we map the geographical distribution of innovative activities in Europe and profile regions in terms of technological capabilities. Second, we elaborate a metric to identify regions’ green innovation potential. Third, we check whether possessing comparative advantage in specific technological domains is associated with a region’s capacity to develop green technologies. JEL classification: O32, Q01, Q55
The objective of this paper is to analyse the relationship between income inequality and environm... more The objective of this paper is to analyse the relationship between income inequality and environmental innovation. We use a complexity-based algorithm to compute an index of green inventive capacity in a panel of 57 countries over the period 1970–2010. The empirical analysis reveals that, on average, inequality is detrimental to countries’ capacity to engage complex green technologies knowledge bases. Using non-parametric methods allows us to further articulate this general finding and to uncover interesting non-linearities in the relationship between innovation and inequality
Entropy, Oct 10, 2018
The present study provides an analysis of empirical regularities in the development of green tech... more The present study provides an analysis of empirical regularities in the development of green technology. We use patent data to examine inventions that can be traced to the environment-related catalogue (ENV-TECH) covering technologies in environmental management, water-related adaptation and climate change mitigation. Furthermore, we employ the Economic Fitness-Complexity (EFC) approach to assess their development and geographical distribution across countries between 1970 and 2010. This allows us to identify three typologies of countries: leaders, laggards and catch-up. While, as expected, there is a direct relationship between GDP per capita and invention capacity, we also document the remarkable growth of East Asia countries that started from the periphery and rapidly established themselves as key actors. This geographical pattern coincides with higher integration across domains so that, while the relative development of individual areas may have peaked, there is now demand for greater interoperability across green technologies.
In order to study wage inequality within US counties among sectors, we chose a between group Thei... more In order to study wage inequality within US counties among sectors, we chose a between group Theil index, as defined in Section Variables of interest. These entropy-based inequality measures are decomposable into a within group component and a between group component, however they are not immune to single outliers [1]. With the aim of testing the robustness of our results, in this Appendix we delineate the same analysis scheme of Section Within one country: the case of the United States, however to measure wage inequality we use a Gini coefficient between-sector. The latter is an inequality measure which have been proved to be stabler to single outlying observations at the top or at the bottom of the distribution, and is the golden standard of inequality measures in the economic literature. For a population of n individuals and a discrete income distribution x ∈ R+ with xp ≤ xp+1 | p = 1, · · · , n, the Gini coefficient independent from the population is defined as follows:
Entropy, 2018
Development and growth are complex and tumultuous processes. Modern economic growth theories iden... more Development and growth are complex and tumultuous processes. Modern economic growth theories identify some key determinants of economic growth. However, the relative importance of the determinants remains unknown, and additional variables may help clarify the directions and dimensions of the interactions. The novel stream of literature on economic complexity goes beyond aggregate measures of productive inputs and considers instead a more granular and structural view of the productive possibilities of countries, i.e., their capabilities. Different endowments of capabilities are crucial ingredients in explaining differences in economic performances. In this paper we employ economic fitness, a measure of productive capabilities obtained through complex network techniques. Focusing on the combined roles of fitness and some more traditional drivers of growth—GDP per capita, capital intensity, employment ratio, life expectancy, human capital and total factor productivity—we build a bridge...
This paper is meant to address the status of the Italian productive system in the wake of the mos... more This paper is meant to address the status of the Italian productive system in the wake of the most severe crisis economies are facing since WWII. In order to accomplish the latter task we rely on the combination of two high quality level dataset informing about so called firm behavioural traits: the first, the IMCPI (2019), collected information on organizational capabilities, practices, attitudes toward innovation, business models and strategies during the period 2016-2018, in so called usual times. The second, the SPIESC-19 (2020), was able to monitor firm responses to the pandemic crisis, collecting information in the period June October 2020. Two results emerge out of our analysis: first, firm responses are highly pathdependent on their pre-crisis organizational capabilities; second, such crisis might turn out be more pervasive than expected, producing widespread, rather than creative, restructuring processes. JEL classification: D21, D22, D83, J24, J53
This paper analyses medium-term labour market trends from 1983 to 2018 in Italy relying on the “R... more This paper analyses medium-term labour market trends from 1983 to 2018 in Italy relying on the “Rilevazione dei contratti di lavoro” from INPS archive which provides information on average salaries by professional category, age, gender, and geographical origin. Within an overall pattern of exacerbated inequalities, documented by means of different indicators, the empirical analysis highlights how the within-component of the wage variation prevails in the gender, age and geographical dimensions. By contrast, the betweencomponent in terms of professional categories (trainees, blue-collar jobs, white-collar jobs, middle managers, executives) is the only between-variation attribute to prevail, corroborating the role played by class schema in explaining wage inequality. Regression-based inequality estimations confirm the role played by social classes. Stratification of wage losses is recorded being largely concentrated among blue-collar professional categories, women, youth, and in the S...
Sinappsi, 2021
This paper applies the Economic Fitness and Complexity approach to analyze the underlying factors... more This paper applies the Economic Fitness and Complexity approach to analyze the underlying factors behind the wide and persistent economic disparities across the Italian regional units. Measures of regional fitness are obtained from their revealed comparative advantage and their patent performance. Southern regions tend to be characterised by a lower level of complexity than the regions in the Centre-North of the country. We interpret these results as indicating a lower level of capability endowment in the South. The system-wide approach of the paper is able to identify some critical sectors which display a rich pattern of connections with other sectors and which could play a pivotal role to create additional capabilities and foster a more balanced regional development. Questo articolo applica il metodo della Economic Fitness and Complexity per analizzare i fattori sottostanti le ampie e persistenti disparità economiche tra le regioni italiane. L'approccio analitico innovativo è basato su sviluppi recenti della letteratura sui sistemi complessi. Vengono proposte due misure di complessità economica regionale: una focalizzata sulla produzione industriale e una sull'attività brevettuale. Mentre si mostra che le regioni del Sud appaiono meno complesse, si identificano dei settori industriali che potrebbero giocare un ruolo fondamentale per creare nuove capabilities e favorire uno sviluppo regionale più equilibrato.
PLoS ONE, 2017
Adapting methods from complex system analysis, this paper analyzes the features of the complex re... more Adapting methods from complex system analysis, this paper analyzes the features of the complex relationship between wage inequality and the development and industrialization of a country. Development is understood as a combination of a monetary index, GDP per capita, and a recently introduced measure of a country’s economic complexity: Fitness. Initially the paper looks at wage inequality on a global scale, over the time period 1990–2008. Our empirical results show that globally the movement of wage inequality along with the ongoing industrialization of countries has followed a longitudinally persistent pattern comparable to the one theorized by Kuznets in the fifties: countries with an average level of development suffer the highest levels of wage inequality. Next, the study narrows its focus on wage inequality within the United States. By using data on wages and employment in the approximately 3100 US counties over the time interval 1990–2014, it generalizes the Fitness-Complexity...
<p>We observe two main features: (i) wage inequality increases over time; (ii) in 1990 we f... more <p>We observe two main features: (i) wage inequality increases over time; (ii) in 1990 we found a non monotonous behavior, while in the following years the second half of the curve experiences a turnaround, and as <i>CRRD</i> increases, inequality in the wage distribution among counties soars.</p
This paper is meant to address the status of the Italian productive system in the wake of the mos... more This paper is meant to address the status of the Italian productive system in the wake of the most severe crisis economies are facing since WWII. In order to accomplish the latter task we rely on the combination of two high quality level dataset informing about so called firm behavioural traits: the first, the IMCPI (2019), collected information on organizational capabilities, practices, attitudes toward innovation, business models and strategies during the period 2016-2018, in so called usual times. The second, the SPIESC-19 (2020), was able to monitor firm responses to the pandemic crisis, collecting information in the period June-October 2020. Two results emerge out of our analysis: first, firm responses are highly pathdependent on their pre-crisis organizational capabilities; second, such crisis might turn out be more pervasive than expected, producing widespread, rather than creative, restructuring processes.
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Papers by Angelica Sbardella