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This chapter estimates heterogeneous productivity growth and spatial spillovers through industrial linkages in the United States and China from 1981 to 2010. The authors employ a spatial Durbin stochastic frontier model and estimates with a spatial weight matrix based on inter-country input–output linkages to describe the spatial interdependencies in technology. The authors estimate productivity growth and spillovers at the industry level using the World KLEMS database. The spillovers of factor inputs and productivity growth are decomposed into domestic and international effects. Most of the spillover effects are found to be significant and the spillovers of productivity growth offered and received provide detailed information reflecting interdependence of the industries in the global value chain (GVC). The authors use this model to evaluate the impact of a US–Sino decoupling of trade links based on simulations of four scenarios of the reductions in bilateral intermediate trade. Their estimation results and their simulations are as mentioned based on date that ends in 2010, as this is the only KLEMS data available for these countries at this level of industrial disaggregation. As the GVC linkages between the United States and China have expanded since the end of their sample period their results can be viewed as informative in their own right for this period as well as possible lower bounds on the extent of the spillovers generated by an expanding GVC.

Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.

We analyse the determinants of poverty transitions, defined as movements across a low-income threshold, in Luxembourg. Data used are those from the Luxembourg socio-economic panel ‘Liewen zu Lëtzebuerg’ (PSELL3) running from 2003 to 2009. Using an endogenous switching first-order Markov model, we control for potential endogeneity to low-income transitions due to both initial conditions and non-random attrition. We find that employment protects from both remaining poor and entering poverty while several characteristics of the head of the household, such as low education or citizenship, and also household composition and housing tenure status are correlated to poverty entry but not to poverty persistence. In addition, attrition and initial low income are found to be endogenous processes with respect to low-income transitions. Finally, genuine state dependence accounts for a substantial level of aggregate state dependence.

Purpose – This chapter investigates vulnerability to poverty in the Republic of Haiti.

Methodology – We use a hierarchical modeling technique to allow the assessment and decomposition of vulnerability to poverty by exploiting the short-panel structure of nested data in a cross section.

Originality – Specifically, a three-level hierarchical model with a partially Bayesian restricted maximum likelihood is used in the estimation procedure. This is novel in this literature.

Findings – The decomposition method adopted in this chapter reveals that vulnerability in the Republic of Haiti is largely a rural phenomenon and is correlated negatively with schooling. The results also disclose the lack of equality in various aspects of circumstances or opportunities, including education, as the salient factor determining the status and level of vulnerability of households. Most importantly, among the different shocks affecting household's income, it is found that meso-level shocks are in general far more important than covariate shocks. This finding points to some interesting policy implications in terms of decentralizing policies and delegating more powers and providing better means to local governments to enhance household resilience to shocks and to alleviate their vulnerability to poverty.