Lessons of international industrial economics

This text is the enlargement of the slides I display to the students throughout my course of “International Industrial Economics” within the two-year degree in “International Business and Development” (a second-cycle degree) taught and examined entirely in English at the University of Parma (Italy) . My opinion is that the reasons behind the course and the methodological approach pursued in the slides deserve both to be systematized and to be proposed to a larger community of students. This opinion is the result of three issues at least. First of all, the idea on the basis of the proposal of an university course named “International Industrial Economics” is very simple: it is no more time and maybe it is meaningless to offer a traditional course of “Industrial Economics”. We have to consider we stay in open economies, many enterprises are heavily involved at the international level and the behaviour of the States is changed in an era of globalization, when a (large) part of the trade rules is set by World Trade Organization. Second, a large part of my students did not study economics deeply during the first degree years. So I am used to propose a short information about traditional microeconomics and industrial organization tools. Of course students historically more educated in economics can avoid it. Rather, I must consider that students (like people in general) are curious about what happens in the real world, more than what is described in the text books, however often without having the availability of a thread to connect the different events. I am providing students with data and references to website: I will try to update them each year, taking advantage of being this text an e-book and not a hardcover. Third, we are in the Internet era. Students can benefit of free downloads of many contributions, starting from the Wikipedia texts. What is still lacking, however, it is the thread connecting these contributions. I hope to provide it.