2019/23 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
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Does the Position in the Inter-sectoral Knowledge Space affect the International Competitiveness of Industries? |
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Francesco Lamperti, Franco Malerba, Roberto Mavilia and Giorgio Tripodi |
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Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
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international trade; industry competitiveness; knowledge flows; patent data.
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JEL Classifications | |||||||||||||||||
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D85, F14, L60, O3
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Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
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This paper empirically investigates how the inter-sectoral knowledge flows affect the international
competitiveness of industries, once controlling for both cost and other technological factors. Using
patent data on 14 manufacturing industries in 16 OECD countries over the period 1995-2009,
we apply a network-based approach to capture the effect of industries' position in the flows of
technological knowledge across industries, which we label inter-sectoral knowledge space. We find
that (i) centrality and local clustering in the inter-sectoral knowledge space positively affect the
export market shares of an industry, (ii) such two effects are rather redundant and, (iii) national-level
knowledge flows' impacts on international competitiveness are way stronger than international ones.
Network measures of position in the knowledge space are found to be more relevant than standard
technological indicators such as patent counts. Our results point to the importance of industries
being well located in the stream of knowledge flows, rather than being innovative per-se, and offers
an novel yet robust proxy to measure technological factors affecting trade performances. In addition,
we find evidence of geographical boundaries of knowledge flows.
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