In Pursuit of a Comprehensive and Customisable Framework for the Accounting of Value Added in International Trade

Gross exports accounting is a novel sub-area of research that seeks to allocate the value added in gross trade flows to its true country and sector of origin and country or sector of destination. Various frameworks have been recently proposed to perform such decompositions. This paper reviews and classifies these into two broad categories: gross exports accounting and cumulative value added accounting. While the former was exhaustively explored by Wang, Wei and Zhu (2013), this paper attempts to refine and generalise the latter. The results are mostly identical to those of Koopman, Wang and Wei (2012) and Stehrer (2013), but the generalised framework attains a desired level of computational efficiency and is highly customisable for specific purpose of global value chain analyses. The refined formulations are applied to describe Russia's export performance from global value chain perspective using the data from the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) for 2000, 2005 and 2010