Understanding European Integration with Bipartite Networks of Comparative Advantage

Bibliographic Details
Title: Understanding European Integration with Bipartite Networks of Comparative Advantage
Authors: Di Clemente, Riccardo, Lengyel, Balázs, Andersson, Lars F., Eriksson, Rikard
Source: PNAS Nexus, Volume 1, Issue 5, November 2022, pgac262
Publication Year: 2022
Collection: Physics (Other)
Quantitative Finance
Subject Terms: Economics - General Economics, Physics - Physics and Society
More Details: Core objectives of European common market integration are convergence and economic growth, but these are hampered by redundancy, and value chain asymmetries. The challenge is how to harmonize labor division to reach global competitiveness, meanwhile bridging productivity differences across the EU. We develop a bipartite network approach to trace pairwise co-specialization, by applying the Revealed Comparative Advantage method, within and between EU15 and Central and Eastern European (CEE). This approach assesses redundancies and division of labor in the EU at the level of industries and countries. We find significant co-specialization among CEE countries but a diverging specialization between EU15 and CEE. Productivity increases in those CEE industries that have co-specialized with other CEE countries after EU accession, while co-specialization across CEE and EU15 countries is less related to productivity growth. These results show that a division of sectoral specialization can lead to productivity convergence between EU15 and CEE countries.
Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, 6 tables
Document Type: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac262
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01080
Accession Number: edsarx.2202.01080
Database: arXiv
More Details
DOI:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac262