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Persistence vs. mobility in industrial and technological specialisations: evidence from 11 Euro area countries

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Abstract

This paper examines the evolution of the patterns of specialisation of 11 Euro area countries in the period 1990–2008, by analysing their comparative and technological advantages. We estimate conditional densities and Markov transition probabilities to examine both the external shape of the distribution of technological and comparative advantages and the intra-distribution dynamics. Our results point out that there is, on average, high persistence of the industrial specialisation patterns of the 11 Euro area countries under scrutiny, confirming a lock-in effect, especially in the case of Italy. Our results for technological specialisation reveal high mobility of technological advantages over the same period, especially for Spain.

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Notes

  1. Austria, the Belgium-Luxembourg Economic Union (BLEU), Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.

  2. In order to reduce the impact of outliers and the impact of wide variation in exchange rate or prices, we exclude the ’Crude oil and natural’ and ’Ores of uranium and thorium’ sectors.

  3. For Greece and Portugal, we can only estimate three-by-three matrices for the STCA index due to their patent applications being concentrated in the first tertile.

  4. See Appendix.

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to one anonymous referee for valuable and helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply.

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  1. University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, GREDEG-CNRS, UMR No. 7321, 250 rue Albert Einstein, 06560, Valbonne, France

    Raphaël Chiappini

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  1. Raphaël Chiappini
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Correspondence to Raphaël Chiappini.

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 1
figure 1

Stacked density and HDR (SBI-18-year transitions)

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Fig. 2
figure 2

Stacked density and HDR (STCA-18-year transitions)

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Chiappini, R. Persistence vs. mobility in industrial and technological specialisations: evidence from 11 Euro area countries. J Evol Econ 24, 159–187 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-013-0331-7

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