Beauty and personal care in mass market: A strategic analysis of perfumery and cosmetics at Sonae MC

Directed internship

Estimating market access in non-GPA countries: A suggested methodology

The WTO’s Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) has data reporting obligations for all its Contracting Parties. Submitting such data promotes transparency in public procurement and also signals tendencies towards discrimination. However, most developing countries, especially emerging economies, are non-members of the GPA and therefore have no comparable data reporting obligations. In most cases, this has led to an absence of any reliable data on these countries’ public purchases, which poses a serious challenge in international negotiations on the subject and in examining the impact of protectionist measures in these countries’ public markets. In this short paper, we attempt to overcome these data challenges by developing a methodology to estimate the size of procurement markets in non-GPA countries as well as foreign market access therein. We also show the results from this methodology for estimating the EU’s access in select emerging economies’ public markets.

Export and import market-specific characteristics. How they drive the decision to trade and how much

Using a rich firm-level dataset on the Italian manufacturing industry, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the role that firms and market characteristics play in shaping firms’ trade activities. We enhance the previous analyses by considering firms’ engagement in international transactions, by focusing on either exports or imports. We show that the determinants of a firm’s export participation and value across countries also drive import behavior. Our research is consistent with the presence of country-specific sunk costs and with a qualitatively similar role of gravity forces and other country attributes on both sides of trading activities. Our evidence, however, militates in favor of a framework where variations in market characteristics have a larger impact on imports than exports.

International students in the private VET sector in Melbourne, Australia: rethinking their characteristics and aspirations outside the deficit model

The reconstruction of the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector into a competitive training market, which led to the participation of international students and commercial for-profit private VET providers, has until
recently focused on the importance of international students to the national economy whilst ignoring the students ’important educational characteristics and the other benefits that accrue to Australia. Drawing on views and perspectives of students, teachers, training managers and quality assurance auditors, this article presents an analysis of the VET provider-level processes, which have contributed tolimited discursive constructions of the identities of international students in private VET providers in Melbourne. It argues that there is an urgent need for a rethinking of the way international students are conceptualised and represented in the competitive training market environment.