Paper Titles & Abstracts

Over the past two decades, the trend in the global economy has been the so-called rise of emerging powers, which saw the economies of many developing countries swiftly converging with those of their more developed peers. The primary engines behind this phenomenon were the four major emerging-market countries Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Globalisation accelerated the industrialization process of the developing world and generated technological spill-overs that enabled some emerging economies to upgrade their technological and manufacturing capabilities. Manufacturing activities shifted progressively from developed economies to emerging economies, with some of them experiencing historical growth performances.This paper assesses the qualitative competitiveness of EU Countries with respect to China, by an analysis of actual trade specialisation in terms of technology classes. This paper use the trade classification method that discriminate between high-tech and low-tech sectors and the different sophistication of commodities according to the main input used: human capital, physical capital, labour, and other resources.If countries compete successfully in high-tech industries and focus on markets in which quality and know-how are more important than low-price strategies, this refers to technological competitiveness, one aspect of qualitative competitiveness.The paper first look at the main theoretical arguments behind the nowadays standard hypothesis that 'technology matters' and that it is technology determining comparative advantages in trade. In the empirical part the line of argumentation will be turned around and it will draw conclusions on the technological competitiveness of countries from an analysis of actually observed trade specialisation. That is, instead of looking at R&D in and output directly (i.e. looking at data on R&D expenditure, qualifications of workers, patents or citations in scientific journals) the paper infers on the technological competencies of EU Countries and China by looking at indicators directly measuring economic performance of goods of different technological sophistication.