The focus of this paper is to investigate the growth performance of Albania and other South Eastern European Countries in the period 1990–2006 by examining traditional growth sources as emerge from standard theoretical models. It focuses on macroeconomic performances and GDP per capita growth rates to examine why countries in the SEE region are lagging behind with respect to other transition economies. The analysis is conducted through stylised growth regressions to estimate convergence rates and coefficients of key factors of growth. Results indicate that real GDP growth in all the eight countries is mainly driven by physical capital accumulation, whereas the contribution of human capital is insignificant or even negative

Following recent models in international trade this paper examines the characteristics that businesses should possess to pursue internationalization strategies. We do this in the peculiar context of Italy, the G-7 country with the largest share of the black economy in GDP. Specifically, we posit that Italian manufacturing firms may use three strategies to counter the competitive threats by emerging economies: (i) improve the innovative content of their products (ii) venturing into offshoring, or, alternatively, (iii) entering the black economy. We estimate the impact of these moves with firm-level data drawn from two waves of the Italian Manufacturing Survey (IMS) covering a six-year period (1998– 2003). We find that offshoring firms are larger, more innovative, have higher capital/labour ratio and are located in provinces where the share of the black economy is lower. Firms belonging to provinces in which the share of the black economy is larger are less likely to choose the internationalization mode. The offshoring-black economy nexus bears relevant policy implications. In particular, vis-a` -vis their offshoring companions, firms choosing to enter the black economy may be producing negative spillover effects by lowering productivity and the propensity to innovate.

This paper compares the productivity ranking of alternative modes of internationalization for a panel of Italian manufacturing firms that are (i) purely domestic or internationally engaged in (ii) exports, (iii) foreign sourcing and (iv) foreign direct investment. By using consistent tests of stochastic dominance of first and second order, as well as by estimating productivity premia across firms for all strategies, we aim at investigating whether and to what extent these modes of firm's entry into the foreign markets conform to the predictions of both Helpman et al. (2004) and Antràs and Helpman (2004)'s seminal papers. While our data confirm the hierarchical theoretical ranking of the traditional moves, no evidence emerges that FDI firms dominate in productivity foreign sourcing firms. Obviously, our evidence also supports the prediction in the literature that domestic firms exhibit lower performances compared to their internationally involved counterparts