Project sheet
CALL: PRIN: RESEARCH PROJECTS OF RELEVANT NATIONAL INTEREST - Call 2022
TITLE: Automation, Trade, and Global Value Chains: New Empirical Evidence and Theory Development
DURATION: 24 months from 09/28/2023 to 09/27/2025
RESPONSIBLE: Prof. Capone Gianluca (Head of Unit)
ERC (European Research Council) SECTOR:SH 1 - "Individuals, Markets and Organisations"
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Goal 8: Decent work and economic growth
Brief description
New technologies that foster automation and digitization are causing transformations in socio-economic systems. Increasing globalization, with longer global value chains, influences the organization of production processes across enterprises and countries, bringing both threats and opportunities. Automation can cause polarization in the labor market and concentration of power in enterprises, but it can also open up new opportunities in the global context. The pandemic of COVID-19 highlighted that technological evolutions, along with barriers to trade, create winners and losers between and within countries. The project focuses on the interplay between automation and internationalization, exploring technologies such as IoT, big data, robotics and artificial intelligence, which could transform the economy, affecting international competitiveness and wage structure. Automation, acquired through imports and spread across sectors, could improve product quality and boost productivity, especially in low-wage countries. In addition, automation could change the international organization of production and push subcontractors to upgrade technology. The approach will depend on the interplay between technological and demand and institutional opportunities.
