Marco R. Di Tommaso

The case of specialized towns in Guangdong, China

The illustration of some preliminary results of an ongoing research on the industry in Guangdong, China, is the core of this article. In particular focus is on the so called ‘specialized towns’ and the industries that characterize them as complex actors of Chinese industrial development. The evidence on these specialized towns is quite interesting as such, being not yet well acknowledged in the international literature. However, it is also believed that an investigation of these realities may contribute to the understanding of new engines of industrial development in the context of contemporary global economic relations—what is called the ‘new industry’. Furthermore, some light is shed on the nature of the competitive challenge that China poses to traditional European industry: it is not only cheap labour, cheap land, dumping, and the like. In the new emerging China government visions, policies and industrial organization architecture seem to play a central role. In this context, the authors conclude proposing a framework of questions relevant to some of the most industrialized areas of Europe, that is the Italian regions characterized by a great diffusion of industrial districts.

Industrial Policy in America

In contrast to what observers have frequently argued, this timely and thought provoking book suggests that the concept of industrial policy is not alien to the American past and present. The debate on this topic in the US has always been full of contradictory rhetoric and policy practices, and the expert authors therefore acknowledge a need to rethink the traditional antagonist positions. They illustrate that contemporary markets continue to demand to be fixed by government policies, and governments continue to show how fixing-the-market policies might fail. The conclusion is that the future of industrial policy is about how to make both markets and governments better in their functioning, but that the real goal for industrial policy is to make better-market and better-government policies consistent with the goal of building a better society.

Health Policy and High-Tech Industrial Development

By weaving together the fields of health economics, industrial organisation and industrial development, this book describes the benefits of promoting a country’s health industry as a way of stimulating its high-technology industrial capacity. The authors illustrate that the development of a country’s health industry not only improves the country’s health status, but also promotes an industry with relatively stable, high-wage employment, creates the potential for exporting goods and services, and produces scientific spillovers that will favourably impact other high-technology industries.

Made-in-China: high-tech national champions of business excellence

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the development strategies of two Chinese global players in the high‐tech sectors.Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts a case‐study approach on Huawei Technology Co. Ltd (Huawei) and Jing‐Hua Optical and Electronics Co. Ltd (JOC).Findings – While Huaweis first strategic decision was that of becoming a leader on the domestic market, the key choice for JOC was that of acquiring a European firm. However common features emerge: persistent investment in R&D, strategic collaboration with universities and presence of government supporting policies, even though the case studies suggest the existence of thresholds for firms to access the benefits of government policy.Research limitations/implications – The results pave the way for more general discussions on the emergence of champions of excellence in China. They reinforce the idea that Chinese industrial development is built on non‐conventional catching‐up processes at the country, local and firm level....

Industrial policy and manufacturing targeting in the US: new methodological tools for strategic policy-making

Abstract The economic crisis has pushed several countries to adopt selective industrial policies to promote manufacturing and some selected strategic sectors. Despite this new activism, the process of defining strategic targets risks being carried out with poor rigour on a political level, setting governments up for failure. This paper discusses the notion of strategic sector and proposes a new methodology to increase transparency and effectiveness in the identification of what can be defined as ‘strategic’. Focusing on the analysis of the US manufacturing system, we develop a composite indicator – the Strategic Sector Index (SSI) – to rank manufacturing industries on the basis of their strategic significance. Furthermore, we apply an uncertainty analysis methodology to the SSI to evaluate the robustness of the ranking and to minimise the degree of policy-makers’ discretionality in influencing the results.

Special Economic Zones and Cluster Dynamics: China

Clusters of specialized firms are now coming to be recognized as an important level of integration and organization in successful industrial economies. Such clusters, among which are industrial districts, were prominent in nineteenth-century European industrial development (in Italy, Britain, and Germany) and in the United States, and then in Japan, and are now viewed as being central to successful industrial development in the twenty-first century in China and India, where they are specifically promoted through ad hoc policies. In designating special economic areas, such as geographic clusters of firms or special economic zones (SEZs), national and regional authorities aim to attract and stimulate economic activities in specific, bounded areas of the country, where business-friendly rules can apply. After presenting the rationale and main features of SEZs, the article illustrates the experience of China, and in particular Guangdong Province and the Pearl River Delta, where SEZs based on Shenzhen and other urban centers have played a prominent role. A careful analysis of the policies adopted in the country to kick off and manage the transition process highlights a central concern of the government to manage the spatial patterns of industrial development. Specific tools have been developed in order to shape the geography of industry: cluster promotion has been pursued while also managing a number of SEZs with the specific aim to concentrate the early stages of industrial development in confined areas, learning from the prior experience of industrial districts in Europe, the United States, and Japan. In China, and especially in Guangdong, the development of SEZs and the promotion of clusters of firms have gone hand in hand to achieve long-term industrial development objectives.

Academic knowledge transfer to industry. Italy: spin-off practices and policies

This paper is about academic Spin-Off (SO) in Italy. It offers an overview of the Italian debate both in academic and in policy-making circuits. First, national and regional policies are analysed. Second, universities practices are described. Then, the paper presents data on how this phenomenon has quickly grown in the last decade. Finally, in the concluding remarks, a list of controversial issues are highlighted.

The Health Industry Model: New Roles for the Health Industry

By weaving together the fields of health economics, industrial organisation and industrial development, this book describes the benefits of promoting a country’s health industry as a way of stimulating its high-technology industrial capacity. The authors illustrate that the development of a country’s health industry not only improves the country’s health status, but also promotes an industry with relatively stable, high-wage employment, creates the potential for exporting goods and services, and produces scientific spillovers that will favourably impact other high-technology industries.

L'industria della salute: oltre il contenimento dei costi

Health systems in wealthy industrialized countries vary considerably. The most visible differences are in their structure, including the size and form of government activity, and the size of their national wealth allocated to health care. More subtle, but equally important, are differences in the level of research and development (R&D) and adoption of new technology that characterize each system. How do we explain these differences in the rates of technological innovation? And if a country desires to increase the level of R&D in its health industry, what industrial policies might it use to accomplish this goal? In this paper we explore these issues by developing a new perspective for viewing the health sector - one that considers the health system as more than an enterprise that produces health, but as a collection of industries that also produces scientific breakthroughs and spillovers and attempts to capture world-wide markets for health services and products.

Transnational Research Networks in Chinese Scientific Production. An Investigation on Health-Industry Related Sectors

Transnational research networks (TRN) are becoming increasingly complex. Such complexity may have both positive and negative effects on the quality of research. Our work studies the evolution over time of Chinese TRN and the role of complexity on the quality of Chinese research, given the leading role this country has recently acquired in international science. We focus on the fields of geriatrics and gerontology. We build an original dataset of all scientific publications of China in these areas in 2009, 2012 and 2015, starting from the ISI Web of Knowledge (ISI WoK) database. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA), we analyze the change in scientific network structure across time. Second, we design indices to control for the different aspects of networks complexity (number of authors, country heterogeneity and institutional heterogeneity) and we perform negative binomial regressions to identify the main determinants of research quality. Our analysis shows that research networks in the field of geriatrics and gerontology have gradually become wider in terms of countries and have become more balanced. Furthermore, our results identify that different forms of complexity have different impacts on quality, including a reciprocal moderating effect. In particular, according to our analysis, research quality benefits from complex research networks both in terms of countries and of types of institutions involved, but that such networks should be “compact” in terms of number of authors. Eventually, we suggest that complexity should be carefully taken into account when designing policies aimed at enhancing the quality of research.