John Paul Clifford (p)

Zsuzsanna Zsibók

The purpose of this research is to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of business and technology parks specialising in foreign direct investment on local employment. The results may inform policy makers around the dynamics of state-owned business and technology parks and provide valuable insights which would be relevant from a regional and spatial perspective.

The development of this state-owned infrastructure is considered a key component in increasing employment, particularly with a regional focus. The role of this investment is critical as the development of large scale infrastructure projects can facilitate key connectivity points in the delivery of goods and services, often between multiple agglomerations.

The research uses a PSM-DiD methodology focusing on Irish Census data from 1986 to 2016 alongside data on the Irish state agency, the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) business and technology parks.

This research identifies the dynamics between agglomerations and infrastructure development. With consistent increasing concentrations of people living in urban regions, the demand for the types and placement of infrastructure, is of increasing interest to both citizens and policymakers from a spatial perspective.

Anna D'ambrosio (p), Luigi Benfratello, Davide Castellani, Alessandro Manello, Katiuscia Lavoratori

John Paul Clifford

The recent global dramatic health and safety challenges are posing unprecedented questions about the future of globalization, grafting on growing political demands against the de-localization of production to other countries and to “bring jobs back home”. As a result, the evidence is increasing about firms that reshore (Dachs et al., 2019; Delis et al., 2019). Reshoring has been defined as ‘a voluntary corporate strategy regarding the home country’s partial or total re-location of (in-sourced or out-sourced) production to serve the local, regional or global demands’ (Fratocchi et al., 2014), with a strong emphasis on manufacturing operations (Ellram, 2013).

The main hindrance to a comprehensive economic analysis of the impact of reshoring has, so far, been represented by the difficulty to provide an accurate measurement of the phenomenon on a large scale and, potentially, across countries.

We intend to fill this gap by taking advantage of a unique dataset linking COEWEB-ISTAT population data about Italian firms’ imports, with Bureau van Dijk Aida and Orbis data about firms’ production sectors and balance sheets.

Our proposed measure of reshoring draws on administrative data on trade, in the wake of the prominent contributions on the measurement of offshoring pioneered by Feenstra and Hanson (1999), their subsequent applications (see, e.g., Feenstra and Hanson, 2003 and Harrison et al., 2011 for comprehensive reviews), as well as Hummels et al., (2014)’s application to firm-level data.

We propose to measure reshoring somewhat symmetrically to offshoring, with some important specifications. We consider firms that were previously involved in offshoring and consider that a firm is reshoring when it experienced (i) a negative change in narrow offshoring to a particular partner country (ii) that is persistent over time and (iii) that is not matched by any increase in narrow offshoring of the same firm to any other country over the following 5 years. We propose to measure reshoring as an event, i.e. the first year for which, at the firm level, the three above conditions are jointly met.

This allows us to compute a measure of reshoring over the 2008-2015 period, which leads us to identifying about 4750 estimated firm-reshoring events over the considered 2008-2015 period.

The resulting measure of reshoring will be employed to map the offshoring and reshoring activities of Italian NUTS3 provinces and provide relevant information for policy makers who will have a potential way to test the implications of their “make it at home” policies

Wioletta Kilar (p)

Anna D'ambrosio

The activities of companies today are very different from their activities a few decades ago. An important phenomenon that we can now observe is the networked nature of companies of all sizes, especially global corporations. “Recent decades have seen the emergence of global value chains (GVCs), in which production stages for individual goods are broken apart and scattered across countries. Examples of this “slicing the value chain” phenomenon are everywhere “ (Johnson 2018:1). According to the standard understanding of MNE investment motives, MNEs invest abroad if they have one (or more) of three types of advantages. This is the ownership, location and internalisation (OLI) framework” (Crescenzi&Harman 2022: 38 after Dunning 1988).

For several decades, Poland has created favourable conditions for the location of enterprises of different sizes and industries. The improvement of key location conditions for the innovation industry has resulted in the appearance of branches of global IT corporations in some regions of the country, which are concentrated in the largest agglomerations. Key factors contributing to this phenomenon are the high quality of human resources (especially access to well-educated young people) and relatively lower operating costs (including labour costs).

With reference to the above premises, the subject of the paper will be the branches of IT corporations that are located in Krakow (Poland). The gradual location of more and more branches of IT corporations in Krakow on the one hand indicates the creation of favourable local conditions for their activities, but on the other hand they consequently influence the area hosting them.

The diverse activities they undertake, ranging from manufacturing to services/trade to research and development in their three activity profiles: Technology Hardware & Equipment, IT Software & Services and Semiconductors, confirms their differentiated role in the global value chains of the respective corporations. Therefore, the aim of the paper will be to identify the role that individual corporations play in GVCs.

Zsuzsanna Zsibók (p), Ildikó Egyed

Wioletta Kilar

Economic development in post-transition countries is dominated by the performance of capital cities, although second-tier cities are also important drivers of development. The presence of high-quality residential environments, better connectivity, high-skilled occupations and increasing populations have a positive impact on the employment dynamism of non-capital areas. However, peripheral regions struggle with problems of adaptation and response, often leading to brain drain and economic decline. Industrial strategies highlight those tradable sectors of the economy that favor leading edge KIBS firms and advanced manufacturing, while neglecting the residentiary economy that is more sheltered from competition and provides jobs in local production and services sectors.
Our research is inspired by the growing literature of the ‘foundational economy’, i.e. mundane economic activities providing essential goods and services, and focuses on the causes of the divergence in economic performance across the NUTS3 regions in ten CEE countries. We investigate regionally aggregated firm-level financial and employment data (Orbis database), including 4-digit NACE codes of the companies with 10+ employees. Our position is that a well-functioning foundational economy is necessary for the whole local economy to work efficiently. Moreover, increasing productivity in the foundational economy should lead to more regionally balanced growth than an exclusive focus on the ‘frontier firms’ that are highly concentrated spatially as the regional productivity gap in the case of foundational activities is not significant. The foundational economy, given its spatial and social inclusivity, can deliver much benefit for non-capital regions, saving them from the circular and mutually reinforcing spiral of deterioration.