Randolph Luca Bruno

The global economy has undergone two significant shifts in recent decades: digitalisation and the green transition. While each has been studied extensively, their intersection remains underexplored. This study reviews metrics for assessing digital and green transformations, both separately and jointly, and identifies key challenges in evaluating their complementarities and trade-offs. By mapping current approaches and offering a comprehensive framework, the paper highlights gaps. The paper proposes a theory-driven metrics framework to support integrated strategies for sustainable innovation and structural transformation toward a green and digital economy.

Firms are more likely to adopt open-sourcing strategies when they operate in environments dense with other innovative firms, allowing reciprocal learning and knowledge exchange.Building on the literature linking sectoral openness to productivity growth, we examine whether firms’ propensity to publish scientific work amplifies the productivity returns to R&D investment.We find that adopting an open-sourcing strategy is positively associated with labour productivity among R&D-intensive firms, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity at the firm and sector level.This result is consistent with theories emphasizing both the direct effects of R&D on innovation output and its indirect effects through knowledge diffusion and absorptive capacity. Methodologically, the paper extends Hausman–Taylor-type approaches for the identification of time-invariant variables in a fixed effect framework. Monte Carlo simulations show that this approach reliably identifies the impact of these regressors on productivity.

Background and objective: The paper explores the impact of foreign direct investment and financial development on regional growth at the EU regional level for 2005–2017. Both FDI and financial development are important determinants of the regions’ growth, but not for all EU regions homogeneously. Some EU regions seem to benefit more than others, depending on certain characteristics, which implies that FDI attraction policies need to bear in mind not only country specificities, but also regional specificities, hence confirming the need for developing FDI attraction policies at the subnational level: financial development, capacity building, and Investment Promotion Agencies are key, for example. Methods: The methodology used in the paper relies on a beta-convergence model and on fixed effects estimation. In addition, a GMM difference model accounts for endogeneity. Results: Our empirical findings indicate that, in less wealthy (and more peripheral) regions compared to wealthy regions, FDI productivity spillovers are more significant. In other words, in less wealthy regions, the imitation effect prevails over the competition effect. Conclusions: FDI and financial development are important determinants of regional growth, especially for less developed and peripheral regions. Contribution/value: Financial development is shown to be a crucial determinant for economic growth at the regional level, especially for peripheral regions, which raises essential policy implications, especially for the sake of economic disparities in the EU NUTS 2 regions. In other words, local access to finance, especially to bank credit, plays a crucial role for regional growth, despite the continuous integration of financial markets. Also, there is an income and geographic heterogeneity when it comes to estimating FDI spillovers; therefore, the impact of FDI on growth is not always homogeneous across territories, which challenges the idea of simple “bright” or “dark” sides to the effects of FDI.

This paper explores the pace and direction of technological development by using a technology upgrade conceptual and measurement framework. This approach is applied to a sample of 164 economies worldwide between 2002 and 2019. Within the framework of technology upgrading, the paper focuses on digitalisation and “greening” as its two significant structural features. We explore their relationship with different components of technology upgrading and the relationship between technology upgrading components and different indicators of macroeconomic productivity. We have adopted a longitudinal fixed effects regression method with control for unobserved heterogeneity, clustered standard errors, and time dummies. Our results show that the growth of research and development (R&D) capabilities does not translate into aggregate productivity growth. There is a lack of unconditional relationship between aggregate productivity growth, digitalisation and greening. However, there are “latecomer advantages” to basic digitalisation for lower middle- and low-income economies and “latecomer liabilities” in the greening of the economy for upper-middle-income economies. In addition, levels of digitalisation and greening do not correlate, suggesting these two transformation processes are not yet integrated into ‘ICT-assisted greening’. When we control for income levels, the impact of components of technology upgrading on productivity is isolated to specific components and significant only for some income groups. The absence of a significant simultaneous effects of several components of technology upgrading on productivity points to large transformation failures. We conclude that the role of science and technology systems in spurring sustainable development would require a broad scope for science and technology (S&T) policies, their coordination, and integration with non-innovation policies.

This paper explores the determinants of productivity gaps within the European Union in computing, chemicals, basic metals and food manufacturing – four sectors that vary in terms of the intensity of sectoral R&D. Our analysis reveals that the main causes of these productivity gaps are intensity of unembodied or disembodied R&D activity and R&D embodied in purchased equipment and machinery, and their interplay. While disembodied and embodied R&D are both associated positively to closing productivity gaps, the interaction between the two does not have the same effect. There is no complementarity between these technology acquisition modes, despite both disembodied and embodied technology are crucial for productivity catch up. In a policy context, this suggests possible lack of coordination between R&D policy and technology transfer (that is, foreign direct investment, trade and industrial policy). We show, also, that the productivity gap between ‘peripheral’ (southern and eastern) and ‘north’ EU countries is widening.

The need of further research on the interlink between culture and institutions has been strongly advocated by economists and institutionalists alike. However, bringing together culture and institutions within an organic framework, though, is a non-trivial operation. This is due to the complexity of the synergies between cultural aspects and institutional devices. This special issue attempts to start filling this gap and to build anad-hocsystemic platform for disseminating such a debate. To this purpose, it brings together an organic collection of contributions in well-established conceptualisations of both culture and institutions, supported by robust and consistent methodological applications. The essays presented in this work provide consistent evidence and conceptual perspectives supporting the idea that the synergies between cultural and institutional aspects are of paramount importance to understand human behaviour, individuals' choices and societies' patterns. They also improve the theoretical, empirical and methodological understanding of the role of institutions and culture in different geopolitical and socio-economic realms. By doing so, these contributions place this special issue as prelude to further research on the co-evolution of culture and institutions and on its possible implications on different societal aspects, human development and well-being.