9:30 - 10:30
Human capital as skill vectors
Complementarity and coordination: conceptualizing human capital beyond the individual
Consequences for macro level development
Break 10:30 - 11:00
11:00 - 11:30
Selective industrial policy for the EU open strategic autonomy: the role of products’ relatedness
Speaker: Filippo Bontadini (LUISS university)
The European Union is facing a growing dependence vis-à-vis external suppliers around strategic technologies, components, and raw materials that are crucial to achieve a fair and successful twin transition both in the green and digital areas. In this context it has developed the concept of open strategic autonomy envisaging the necessity to strengthen existing industrial capabilities and developing new ones, while maintaining an open trade policy. In view of these goals, the Draghi Report explicitly calls to set priorities for selective targeted industrial policy. This paper focuses on a selection of products belonging to sensitive ecosystems where Europe has a dependence and on a set of products relevant for the twin transition and, based on the economic literature on capabilities and economic relatedness, identifies which products are closest to countries’ productive structure. The results of the empirical analyses point to the importance of considering technological complementarities when designing policy interventions and of better coordinating industrial strategies between the EU and Member States.
11:30 - 12:00
From theory to policy: Leveraging Economic Complexity and Product Space for strategic diversification in developing countries
Speaker: Clovis Freire (UN Trade and Development - UNCTAD)
This presentation explores how Economic Complexity and Product Space analysis can inform strategic economic diversification in developing countries. Drawing on two recent UNCTAD initiatives (i.e. the Suape Industrial Port Complex project in Brazil and the ongoing Rapid Assessment of Value Addition and Diversification Capacities in Namibia, Zambia, and Madagascar) the presentation illustrates how data-driven insights can guide countries in identifying viable, higher-value sectors based on existing capabilities, and guide the design and policy instruments to foster diversification. The approach bridges top-down development priorities with bottom-up evidence from production and trade structures, offering a practical two-step framework to translate diversification potential into targeted policy action. The case studies show how these tools could help countries move out of commodity dependence, building diversified, resilient and inclusive economies that are better positioned in global value chains.
12:00 - 12:30
Speaker: Alessia Lo Turco (Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona)
Lunch 12:30 - 13:30
13:30 - 14:00
In contexts involving teachers and students, knowledge transfer is commonly assumed from the former to the latter. However, what if teachers learn from students? This paper investigates the bidirectional knowledge transfer between PhD students and their supervisors. We consider 40,852 PhD students who graduated in the STEM fields in France between 2010 and 2018. Focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) knowledge transfer, we find evidence that a student supervised by a supervisor with AI knowledge is 10 percentage points more likely to write a thesis in AI than a student with a supervisor with no AI knowledge, denoting an AI knowledge transfer from supervisors to students. We also find that a supervisor with no AI knowledge is 19 percentage points more likely to publish an article with AI content if exposed to a student with AI knowledge than a supervisor not exposed to a student with AI knowledge, denoting an AI knowledge transfer from students to supervisors. Those results confirm the bidirectionality of the learning process.
14:00 - 15:00
15:00 onwards