Department of Sociology and Social Research

"The fund-flow approach to production theory was proposed by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen almost half a century ago and it provides a description of production as a process unfolding in time and entailing a temporal coordination between different elements. Despite the initial interest, the approach has seldom received attention by mainstream economists and it is not yet well known. The paper critically surveys Georgescu-Roegen’s model, together with: i) the later developments and modifications; ii) the recent criticisms focused on its limitations
due to the instrumental assumption of constant efficiency for funds. The paper concludes by discussing the limits and comparative merits and suggesting possible applications."

The diffusion of outsourcing and vertical foreign direct investment (FDI) among manufacturing firms, along with the vertical integration of market services into manufacturing, is questioning the ‘Deindustrialisation/Tertiarisation’ (DT) hypothesis. In particular, it has been argued that DT might be an ‘apparent’ phenomenon, in fact amounting to a simple reorganisation of production across national and sectoral boundaries. The empirical studies that try to support this hypothesis, however, cannot be deemed conclusive as they suffer two methodological drawbacks: a sectoral level of analysis and a not truly global empirical approach. In order to overcome these drawbacks, the paper carries out an investigation of the actual extent to which DT occurred in the OECD area over the 1980s and the 1990s with two modifications: a subsystem instead of sectoral perspective, retaining both direct and indirect relations and a ‘pseudo-world’ of seven OECD countries, thus taking into account the ‘global’ dimension of the phenomenon. Our results strongly support the DT hypothesis: although the weight of market services in the manufacturing subsystem increases, providing a counterbalance to manufacturing decline, subsystem shares significantly decrease, thus confirming DT as a more fundamental trend of the investigated period.

The paper estimates the impact on Total Factor Productivity of trade-related R&D spillovers by accounting for the economic distance between countries. The Average Propagation Length foreign R&D covers to reach a domestic country is used in building the foreign available R&D stock and to estimate its TFP impact vs. that of the domestic R&D stock. With respect to 20 OECD countries in the period 1995-2005, the impact on TFP of the available foreign R&D stock is greater than that of the domestic one. Results support the models that recognize indirect trade-related R&D spillovers and provide for them a more
accurate interpretation.

The examination in this paper aims to bridge outsourcing and structural change analyses in order to obtain more accurate insights into the extent of outsourcing and to extract more reliable policy recommendations for dealing with its effects. We do this by applying a ‘battery’ of outsourcing measurements to a group of OECD countries from 1980 to the mid 1990s. Expected results (e.g. the idiosyncratic outsourcing patterns of the UK) are confirmed on a more systematic and comparable basis, while original results (e.g. the low integration of business services in manufacturing in the former socialist economies) are based on the exploitation of new data.

Although FDI have been at the forefront of economic debate since a long time, economists have not yet developed a unified framework for their investigation. In this paper, we put forward the idea that an essential point to analyze FDI concerns their underpinning motives. Motives are at the core of FDI and FDI are only but one of different alternative means for firms to grasp an opportunity in a foreign country. We discuss the factors that shape the set of available alternatives and analyze those affecting the decision to engage in FDI (internalisation determinants), along with those influencing their localisation (localisation determinants). Starting from Dunning (1993) we put forward a revised taxonomy of FDI motives consistent with this framework - resource seeking, market seeking and non-marketable asset seeking. In order to show its practical implications, we survey common empirical issues on FDI showing how our analysis can shed light on seemingly contradictory empirical results.

The paper discusses, illustrates and possibly contributes to overcoming two methodological problems that emerge in applying Social Network Analysis (SNA) to the study of IO-based innovation flows matrices. The first has to do with the scale-effects these matrices suffer from. The second refers to the need of dichotomising the matrices. Through an illustrative application to six OECD countries in the mid-1990s, the paper shows that, as for the former problem, different relativisation procedures can be, and have been, used, which either tend to alter the actual meaning of standard SNA indicators, or do not properly take into account the actual composition of countries' final demand. As for the latter problem, the paper shows that the choice of discrete cut-offs is extremely sensitive, as comparative results actually change along the continuum of the matrices values. In order to overcome the scale problem, a new relativisation procedure is put forward that measures innovation flows embodied in a unit value basket of final demand and thus properly retains all the information provided by the original matrix of intersectoral innovation (embodied) flows. In addressing the problem of dichotomisation, the paper suggests, as a second best, to work with density distributions that can make the choice of discrete cut-off values less arbitrary.

The paper aims to investigate how innovations cluster in different technological systems (TSs) when their “techno-economic”, rather than “territorial” space, is considered. Innovation clusters of economic sectors are identified by referring to the innovation “potential” represented by their R&D expenditure and by applying social network analysis to the intersectoral R&D flows matrices of 15 OECD countries in the mid-1990s. Different clusterization models are first tested in order to detect the way sectors group on the basis of the embodied R&D flows they exchange. Actual clusters are then mapped in the different TSs by looking for intersectoral relationships which can be qualified to constitute “reduced TSs” (ReTSs). In all the 15 TSs investigated the techno-economic space appears organized in hierarchies, along which its constitutive sectors grouped into clusters with different density and composition. Once ReTSs are looked for, the 15 TSs display highly heterogeneous structures, but with some interesting similarity on the basis of which different clusters of TSs can be identified in turn.

The paper aims at investigating the capacity of input-output analysis to identify the structural change implications of outsourcing. In particular, it develops the idea that outsourcing leaves «traces» in the intersectoral structure of one economy that can be caught empirically, to a different extent by different indicators. The pros and cons of these indicators are discussed from a methodological point of view and their actual interpretative power shown through an application to the OECD area for the ’80s and the early ’90s. The main result of the paper is that an accurate mapping of the relationship between outsourcing and structural change requires us to use different indicators jointly, rather than alternatively. In particular, a purely sectoral kind of perspective needs to be combined with a subsystem one, which detects the effects of outsourcing on the vertical integration degree of one economy’s sectors.

Global sourcing can increase firms’ productivity via the quality upgrading of intermediates, but, because of the heterogeneity of suppliers, it also increases screening costs of final firms given the need to search for good suppliers. We build up a simple model to analyze these factors and show that large firms can better exploit the potential gains from quality upgrading. Moreover, we show that business & social networks make both the overall production and firms’ profitability increase via the reduction in firms’ unit screening costs. There are cumulative beneficial effects of these networks: Thicker networks imply higher cost saving and thus further incentives to invest in network linkages. Finally, we sketch a possible extension of the model to analyze the choice of local vs. global sourcing strategies and how their differences, in terms of costs, suppliers’ heterogeneity and degree of embeddedness in networks, affect firms’ choices and their efficiency.

We present a generalization of spatial power indexes able to overcome their main limitations, namely: i) the excessive concentration of power measures; ii) the too high sensitivity to players' location in the ideological space. Voters' propensity to support an issue is modeled via a random utility function with two additive terms: the deterministic term accounts for voters' preference-driven/predictable behavior; the random one is a catch-all term that accounts for all the idiosyncratic/unpredictable factors. The relative strength of the two terms gives rise to a continuum of cases ranging from the Shapley value, where all aggregation patterns are equally probable, to a standard spatial value, like the Owen-Shapley index, where instead the conditional order is fully deterministic. As an illustrative application, we analyze the distribution of power in the Council of Ministers under three different scenarios: i) EU15 Pre-Nice; ii) EU27 Nice Treaty; iii) EU27 Lisbon Treaty.

In a recent paper, McCarthy and Anagnostou (2004, The impact of outsourcing on the transaction costs and boundaries of manufacturing, International Journal of Production Economics, 88, pp. 61-71) use a decomposition approach put forward by Dietrich (1999, Explaining economic restructuring: an input-output analysis of organisational change in the European Union, International Review of Applied Economics, 13(2), pp. 219-40) to analyze the impact of contracting-out in the UK manufacturing decline over the '80s and the '90s. Dietrich claims that this decomposition can distinguish the part of the manufacturing output decrease produced by the increased integration of services in manufacturing from the one which is instead produced by final demand-related changes.This paper aims at critically examining Dietrich's decomposition approach and showing its flaws. In so doing, the paper also carefully analyzes the changes outsourcing produces in input-output tables. Thus, it might prove useful also in avoiding further mistakes in using input-output analysis for studying outsourcing-related changes in economic structure.

The paper analyzes how the structure of social networks affects innovation diffusion and competition under different information regimes. Diffusion is modeled as the result of idiosyncratic adoption thresholds, local network effects and information diffusion (broadcasting and demonstration effect from previous adopters). A high social cohesion decreases the probability of one innovation cornering the market. Nonetheless, with imperfect information, in small-world networks the higher speed of diffusion produced by the low average distance increases this probability. A low social cohesion also increases the probability of falling into traps of under-adoption. However, such probability is significantly lower with imperfect information, because such regime is characterized by higher levels of market concentrations and this reduces the frictions due to the coexistence of non-compatible product innovations.