Networks of International Trade and Investment: Understanding globalisation through the lens of network analysis

Dr. Sara Gorgoni has an MA in Political Economy from the University of Essex and a PhD in Development Economics from Roma Tre University. She has been Senior Lecturer in Economic Sociology at the University of Greenwich, London, since 2010, where she specialises in business economics and network analysis. She is currently involved in several projects investigating the relationship between global networks in trade and investments. She has also conducted research on foreign direct investment from emerging countries, innovation networks, clusters of SMEs and global value chains. Moreover, she has carried out research for the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Bank and other United Nations agencies. Her work has been published in several world-famous journals including the International Business Review and World Economy.

Alessia Amighini is Co-Head of the Asia Centre and Senior Associate Research Fellow at ISPI. She is Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economic and Business Studies (DiSEI) at the University of Piemonte Orientale (Novara, Italy), and Adjunct Professor of International Economics at the Catholic University (Milan, Italy). Amighini previously worked as an Associate Economist at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD, Geneva, Switzerland). Alessia holds a PhD in Development Economics from the University of Florence (Italy) and a Master in Economics as well as a BA in Economics from Bocconi University (Milan, Italy). She has published in many international peer-reviewed journals such as China Economic Review, World Development, The World Economy, International Economics, China and the World Economy. Alessia also published chapters in several books for Edwar Elgar, Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, Palgrave, Routledge; she coauthored 'L'economia della Cina' (Carocci, 2007) and Macroeconomics: A European Perspective (Pearson, 2010 and 2013). She has contributed to several international research projects sponsored by the Central Bank of Sweden, Inter-American Development Bank and UNU-WIDER.

Matthew Smith is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. Dr Smith completed his PhD in international business and economics at the University of Greenwich in 2016, where he made use of advanced social network analysis techniques to inform on the organisation of production in the global economy. Broadly, his research interests focus on social network analysis, more specifically, the application of Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to explain how observed network structures emerge, and multilevel network analysis. Currently, Dr Smith is working on a project that aims at testing hypotheses derived from theoretical models of cultural evolution to shed light on the diffusion of innovations in a small scale society.