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This paper examines the characteristics that relate to a country’s entrepreneurial attitudes, perceptions, intentions, and aspirations for 17 developing and emerging economies during the 2002-2016 period. Many of those countries have recorded high economic growth rates and have increasingly become more outward-oriented in terms of both, exporting activities as well as direct investments abroad. The empirical analysis is based on survey data from the Adult Population Survey of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) project. We create an overall entrepreneurial attitude index (taking values between 0 and 100) from 6 underlying GEM entrepreneurial attitude indicators. In addition to examining relevant cross-country patterns and trends, a statistical analysis is conducted to test whether a more positive entrepreneurial attitude in a country is associated with a higher international business orientation. The findings indicate that there has been an increase in the overall entrepreneurial attitude index on average, but there are different trends among countries. Most importantly, the results show that improved entrepreneurial attitudes do not explain the increasing international business orientation that has been observed during the sample period. This suggests that in the developing and emerging economies under study other factors were strongly driving the expansion of international business activities.

We analyze industrial specialization and geographic concentration patterns within the NAFTAregional integration area during 1988-2000 and examine the determinants of spatial concentration. Theresults indicate that NAFTA countries have become increasingly dissimilar over time. A changing spatialstructure of total NAFTA manufacturing is also evident. Manufacturing is increasingly relocating toMexico, which comes at the expense of the US. In addition, there is evidence of a general upward trendin the degree of relative geographic concentration of North American industries. Labor-intensive andlow-technology activities appear to be the most spatially concentrated industries, exhibiting a strongincreasing trend. Comparative advantage factors largely explain geographic concentration of industriesacross NAFTA countries, indicating the empirical relevance of traditional trade theory in the NAFTAcase.

The paper describes a spatial economic agent-based model (ABM), consistent with the principles of new economic geography (NEG), which allows the discrete-time evolutionary simulation of complex interactions of household and firm location choices. In contrast with the current ABM approaches, it considers a multi-regional (multi-urban) setting to enable a more realistic representation of decisions related to commuting, migration and household and employment location. The model allows simulating spatially differentiated, multi-commodity markets for land and labor in a system of cities and the behavior of profit-maximizing firms with multi-regional asset investment decisions, incorporating endogenous intra- and inter-urban transport costs with congestion effects. It also accounts for the impact of industrial and urban agglomeration forces on location choices and the formation of urban development patterns. Other features include the representation of the actions of central and local government agents to address issues of territorial development, efficiency and equity. The simulation set-up and evolutionary analysis of the spatial ABM are presented and several implications are discussed with regard to the possible outcomes of a set of policy interventions.

This document is the technical annex to the full paper "Varieties or Qualities? Horizontal and Vertical Intra-industry Trade within the NAFTA Trade Bloc" which is available separately.

This article investigates empirically the nature and the dynamics of intra-regional trade in North America. Specifically, we analyze intra-NAFTA patterns of horizontal and vertical intra-industry trade - H(V)IIT - in the United States, Canada and Mexico over the 1992-2002 period and examine some industry characteristics of observed IIT patterns for each IIT component. The results indicate that though HIIT and VIIT exhibit different trends, both IIT types are important in labour/resource-intensive sectors, suggesting that comparative advantage may be an important factor in intra-NAFTA IIT. The most striking finding is that HIIT is consistently increasing, while VIIT exhibits a significant downward trend. Hence, our findings suggest that intra-NAFTA IIT has increasingly become an exchange of different varieties rather than different qualities, indicating to some extent an economic convergence process within the NAFTA trade bloc.