The European core-periphery divergent development before the crisis

Innovation drivers of external competitiveness in the great recession

“…This result might be related to the relatively slow recovery that characterized, during the post-crisis phase, the European domestic market vis-à-vis the Chinese, US, or the UK’s one. In times of fiscal consolidation and austerity at home (Celi et al 2018 ), European companies that accessed new foreign markets may have mostly benefited from the increasing demand in USA and China where, in turn, expansionary policies have been in place along the entire post-crisis phase.…”

Supply chain contagion and the role of industrial policy

“…Notably, the evolution of the backward participation index of the Italian automotive industry (sector 29) is the one showing the most marked increase from 2005 to 2015, which goes from 30 to 35%. This growing trend mirrors the offshoring of manufacturing stages of production increasingly carried out by a share of Italian firms towards Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) since the Nineties (Celi et al 2018 ).…”

“…Second, such European industrial plan could favour economic convergence among country members, finally closing the long-term structural asymmetries which triggered the European debt crisis of 2009–2013 and doomed Europe to a sluggish recover in the following years (Celi et al 2018 ). It follows that investments needed to pursue such industrial strategy should be firstly addressed towards those European countries which in the last decades have suffered the most the progressive impoverishment of their production matrix (Celi et al 2020 ; Landesmann and Stollinger 2018 ; Lucchese and Pianta 2020a ).…”

A fragile and divided European Union meets Covid-19: further disintegration or ‘Hamiltonian moment’?

“…The first decade following the introduction of the EMU saw continuity in the process of Europeanisation embarked upon as from the formation of the Common Market, based on financial liberalization and market globalization. As argued in Celi et al ( 2018 , 2019 ), Europeanisation meant EU-wide application of a policy of deregulation of goods, labour and capital markets that affected the timing, shape and direction of the European integration process, halting the process of convergence between the core and the SP of the EU. The more developed core (centred on Germany) increased its productive and technological capacity; the SP, caught between product competition within the EU and cost competition from emerging economies in the international markets, saw a decline in its manufacturing capacity.…”

“…With domestic demand subdued, the high growth rates recorded by these countries are entirely led by the growth in exports of local production by foreign multinationals (i.e., the so-called “integrated peripheral markets”). While their intensive specialisation in the automotive industry makes them totally dependent on the health of the German automotive industry, the foreign control of production decisions, innovation processes and markets makes it extremely difficult to undertake an independent, less unbalanced development path (Celi et al 2018 ).…”