Working Papers
F. Bontadini, V. Meliciani, M. Savona, R. Urbani, A. Wirkierman – EU Open Strategic Autonomy: Evidence on strategic dependencies through trade and ownership linkages
Policies for open strategic autonomy usually measure external dependence by the location in which production occurs. This paper asks whether that assessment changes when value added is attributed to the country of the producer's ultimate owner. We combine the OECD Inter-Country Input-Output framework with the analytical Activities of Multinational Enterprises ownership dimension for 2000-2023, covering 76 economies, a rest-of-world aggregate, and 41 industries. The analysis develops three complementary descriptive measures: the ownership composition of gross output; a nearshoring ratio comparing regional with extra-regional foreign value added; and global supplier shares attributed by either production location or ultimate ownership. Results show that ownership materially changes the diagnosis of dependence. European economies have substantially higher foreign-owned output shares than the United States and China, particularly in high-tech manufacturing and knowledge-intensive business services. For Italy, regional integration is comparatively strong, but geography and ownership diverge in high-tech activities: production located within Europe is increasingly owned and controlled by non-European firms. At the global level, the European Union's share of supplied value-added declines under both concepts, China's rise in high-tech manufacturing is larger by geography than by ownership, and the United States retains a leading position in knowledge-intensive services. The evidence is descriptive rather than causal. It implies that monitoring systems for strategic autonomy should jointly track production location and ultimate corporate control, especially in technology- and knowledge-intensive sectors.