| Summary: | Over the last three decades the political economy debate abandoned its focus on manufacturing as the main engine of the technological dynamism and the source of the wealth of nations. However recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in manufacturing production. This has led analysts to announce and welcome a worldwide 'manufacturing renaissance' emerging in different contexts with multiple focuses. The thesis provides new analytical and empirical lenses for disentangling the dynamics of manufacturing development. We do this by showing how learning processes are the fundamental category responsible for production capabilities dynamics which in turn trigger structural change. Essay 1 'The Manufacturing Renaissance: Transforming Industrial Systems and the Wealth of Nations' presents a novel synthesis of two strands of economic research, Structural Economic Dynamics and the Economics of Capabilities. Within this framework we integrate structural change and production capabilities dynamics. The following Essays of this dissertation apply and extend this theoretical synthesis by focusing firstly on learning in production structures and cumulative (non-linear) structural change dynamics (Essays 2 and 3 respectively); secondly, in developing new diagnostics for industrial policies design (Essay 4); finally, in investigating industrial policies for manufacturing development (Essay 5). Essay 2 'Structural Learning: Embedding discoveries and the dynamics of production' extends the current framework by rembedding learning dynamics from which production capabilities are generated in the production structure itself. Essay 3 'Manufacturing Agrarian Change. Agricultural production, intermediate institutions and Intersectoral commons: Lessons from Latin America' than applies the concept of structural learning developed in Essay 2 to the intersectoral interdependencies on the interface of agriculture and manufacturing. Moreover, we show how in the context of Chile and Brazil intersectoral learning from which intersectoral commons derive was facilitated by the development of intermediate institutions. Essay 4 'Production Capability Indicators. Mapping countries' structural trajectories and the assessment of industrial skills in LDCs: The case of Tanzania' addresses the problem of capturing these learning dynamics through production capabilities indicators at the national level. Not only do we propose a new theoretically-sensitive methodology for quantifying learning dynamics but also we apply this to industrial skills assessment in Tanzania. Finally, Essay 5 'Industrial Policy for Manufacturing Development. Structural dynamics and institutional changes in a dual economy: A case of dependent industrialisation in the Italian Mezzogiorno' focuses on the development of industrial policies, the latter understood as mechanisms to trigger learning dynamics at the sectoral and intersectoral level. The Italian 'Mezzogiorno' case is presented to illustrate these dynamics in a context of dependent industrialisation.
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