Firms' survival is often seen as crucial for economic growth and competitiveness. This article focuses on business demography of Italian firms, using an original database, obtained by matching and merging to gain the intersection of three firm level datasets. This database allows us to simultaneously consider the effect of size, technology, trade, FDIs and innovation on firms' survival probability. We show that size and technological level positively affect the likelihood of survival. Internationalized firms show higher failure risk: on average competition is stronger in international markets, forcing firms to be more efficient. However, large internationalized firms are more likely to 'survive'. An Italian internationalized firm to be successful and to survive, should be high-tech, large and innovative.

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Trade is a key channel through which Chinese economic growth affects the world economy and especially developing countries. Despite strong ongoing changes in its productive structure, China's comparative advantage is still in low value added manufacturing products. African manufacturing production is confined to few traditional productions. Hence, even if at times, and in some sectors, African exports have been favoured by preferential treatments, Africa has proven to be particularly vulnerable to the competitive threat posed by China in third markets, including other African countries. With the intensification of economic relations, in fact, China has started flooding African markets with its low cost manufactures, often at the expense of local producers. Furthermore, Chinese goods are likely to crowd out cheap African manufactures in main trade partners of Africa, namely US and EU. We measure the indirect impact of China on African exports. Using disaggregated data for the period 1995-2005, we present significant evidence on the existence of a displacement effect at different levels: sector, product, region and market.

This paper analyzes the participation and the position of North African countries into global value chains (GVCs). Exploiting the recently released multiregional Input-Output tables from UNCTAD-Eora, we describe regional and country GVC involvement. North African countries have not been able so far to fully integrate into international production networks. However, large part of their (low) trade is due to value added related activities, mainly in the upstream phases, and the importance of foreign linkages has been increasing over time signalling the existence of unexploited opportunities. We complement the Input-Output analysis with evidence from bilateral trade ‡ows and case studies from speci…c sectors. This anecdotal evidence is in line with previous …ndings. Overall, our results suggest that enhancing GVC participation of North African countries is likely to substantially bene…t local industries, countries and the whole area. However, the ability to retain such bene…ts relies on speci…c characteristics, such as the level of human capital, the trade logistics and the presence of trade barriers, thus leaving room for policy intervention.

Higher productivity of multinational firms and exporters has been widely documented in the literature, but the sources of this heterogeneity are still a black box. Using an original dataset on Italian firms, we show that higher total factor productivity of international firms can be to some extent explained by higher R&D intensity and managerial capabilities. However, our results suggest that heterogeneity is more in the slope than in the constant of the production function. In particular, allowing international firms to have different return to labour and capital inputs, we are able to account for their entire productivity premium. This has implications for both labour and capital market reforms.total factor productivity, firm heterogeneity, exporters, multinational firms,