The phenomenon of global value chains (GVCs) indicates a division of labour type production structure in which tasks and business functions are distributed among several companies, globally, or regionally (Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg 2008). The critical features of GVCs are therefore the...

As we can understand with the spread of GVCs, a lot of new questions emerge regarding the measurement of participation and positioning in the globalised production process. The World Development Report (WDR) 2020 explains the GVC phenomenon and then focus on participation and the prospects...

This paper explores the emergence of a world economy since 1950 and its implications for the world's labor force. There are four main sets of conclusions. First, although the integration of national economies since 1950 has been considerable, the world economy is still in its adolescence. Rapid...

This paper explores patterns of quality differentiation and specialization relying on model-level panel data of retail sales and prices of refrigerators across 23 countries in the European Union. Unlike customs data aggregated at the product category, typically used in the literature,...

The standard neoclassical model of trade theory predicts that international specialization will be jointly determined by cross-country differences in relative factor endowments and relative technology levels. This paper uses duality theory combined with a flexible functional form to specify an...

This paper examines the home country bias in the goods market among OECD countries. An average country imports about two and a half times as much from itself as from an otherwise identical foreign country, after controlling for sizes of exporter and importer, their direct distance, geographic...

There are two principal theories of why countries trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in accounting for production structure and trade. We use a framework that nests an increasing...

We show that even in the absence of diminishing returns in production and techno-logical spillovers, international trade leads to a stable world income distribution. This is because specialization and trade introduce de facto diminishing returns: countries that accumulate capital faster than...

This paper focuses on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-a major final assembler in production-where studies and evidence on the role of the region in global value chains are limited. We seek to provide new evidence regarding the extent and patterns of international fragmentation...

Differently from the previous natural disasters, COVID-19 is not specific to a country or an industry, but a pandemic that affects the global connectivity of goods and services. Furthermore, the so-called bullwhip effect aggravates the negative impacts from the demand shock, where an initial...