National economies are linked through flows of capital and goods. This book addresses those linkages, analyzes their benefits for economic development, and evaluates a country's opportunities to reap the best possible rewards by influencing the linkages. The book focuses on the role of product characteristics in international economics and their impact on economic development. After an introduction to the topic, it analyzes the influence of product sophistication on growth, and offers alternative means of measuring product characteristics. In turn, the book provides evidence for the impact of foreign equity on the characteristics of the products that firms produce. Moreover, it presents empirical findings that prove that the quality of a country's legal and institutional framework is influenced by said country's predisposition to trade rule-of-law-intensive goods.

Stephan Huber has been working as a research assistant at the University of Regensburg (Department of Economics) since 2011. In 2017, he completed his doctorate at the University of Trier and became a postdoc at the University of Regensburg. His main research interests are urban and international economics, topics on which he has published articles in various international journals including the Canadian Journal of Economics and the Stata Journal.