Ricerc@Sapienza

Fragmentation of vertically integrated production processes (known also as vertical specialization) implies that production blocks are located in different countries and geographical areas across the world countries. This study extends the quantitative measure of vertical specialization, originally proposed by Hummels et al. (2001), into a multi-country framework. Based on this approach, vertical specialization in the world economy was studied between 1995 and 2011.

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is recognized as an effective practice to support circular economy and sustainable development because it is able to enhance the technical efficiency of production processes, provided IS relationships among companies remain active over the long period. However, although it has been established that IS relationships can be vulnerable to disruptive events that reduce the willingness of companies to cooperate in IS synergies, to date few contributions to the literature focus attention on the events which lead firms to interrupt IS synergies.