SÉMINAIRE DE RECHERCHE EN ÉCONOMIE - GATE LYON SAINT-ÉTIENNE : Simona Iammarino

Simona Iammarino, London School of Economics and Political Science, présentera un séminaire intitulé : Technology and geography in a paradigm shift : the case of Critical & Conflict Materials in ICT.
Elle interviendra par visioconférence.

Résumé / abstract  : The mining of several critical raw materials – including the so-called ‘conflict minerals’ associated with armed conflict, human rights abuses and corruption – and their combination, refining and use in many new advanced electronic products, are providing an important material infrastructure to the shift of technological paradigm towards Industry 4.0. This has far-reaching geo-economic and geo-strategic implications for regions, countries, governments, firms, and resource-dependent global value chains and production networks. Relying on text analysis of USPTO patent data between 1976 and 2017, our explorative study provides a methodological and empirical starting point for exploring the technological and geographical linkages between ICT and related AI technologies, on the one hand, and selected critical and conflict materials (CCMs), on the other. Our descriptive analysis aims to open-up a promising research agenda, and finds evidence both of an association between the ICT paradigm and CCM intensity, and of a significant spatial inequality between the locations where a large amount of CCMs are extracted (often in the Global South) and the hot spots where the majority of CCM-based innovation is appropriated (mostly in the Global North). 

Simona Iammarino