It becomes evident that international trade in neither directly embodied C&T-value added nor directly embodied C&T-labor was evenly distributed across space and only a few trade linkages dominated international trade.
Moreover, by comparing international trade of directly embodied C&T-value added with that of directly embodied C&T-labor, it gets evident that intertemporal changes in the latter variable in general were more pronounced for both case study countries.
Furthermore, trade within regional blocks with respect to directly embodied C&T-labor already in 1995 was less important than for directly embodied C&T-value added.
To sum up, our findings also indicate that the relative importance of the domestic versus the international market for directly embodied C&T-value added and C&T-labor could be a source of different degrees of vulnerability to the restructuring of C&T-trade in the two case study countries.
In doing so, we again separate between directly embodied C&T-value added and C&T-labor.
Overall, for Italy domestic C&T-trade of directly embodied C&T-value added was by far more important in both years than for Portugal.
Fig. 2 Intensity of international C&T-trade relations with respect to directly embodied C&T-value added, 1995 (upper panel) and 2009 (lower panel).
In an international comparison, Italy in terms of both in- and outflows of directly embodied C&T-value added ranked among the top 5 in 1995 and its status got even more important.
Hence, Portuguese intermediate C&T-demand built by far more on the international market with respect to directly embodied C&T-value added than was the case for Italy.
As discussed before, the changes in intermediate and final demand C&T-outflows for both directly embodied C&T-value added and C&T-labor were much more pronounced in Portugal than in Italy, signalizing that the latter country retrieved to a relatively larger extent from C&T-production C&T-productionnandcompetinternational harder for Portugal to stabilize the situation in its competitionion.
