The past decades have witnessed a rapid globalisation of economic activity which has significantly changed the outlook of the world economy. International production, trade and investments are increasingly organised within so-called global value chains (GVCs) where the different stages in the...

One of the distinctive characteristics of the current globalisation process is the emergence of global value chains. Within global value chains and international production networks, not only are final goods traded internationally, but intermediate goods (parts and components) and, in recent...

In analyzing firm entry and exit across Belgian manufacturing industries, this paper presents evidence that import competition and foreign direct investment discourage entry and stimulate exit of domestic entrepreneurs. These results are in line with theoretical occupational choice models, where...

In analyzing the distinctive contribution of foreign subsidiaries and domestic firms to productivity growth in aggregate Belgian manufacturing, this paper shows that foreign ownership is an important source of firm heterogeneity affecting productivity dynamics. Foreign firms have contributed...

In analyzing firm productivity in Belgium, this article shows empirically that both scale and efficiency contribute positively to the typical productivity advantage of foreign affiliates. Stochastic production frontier estimation using the translog functional form indicates that foreign...

Manufacturing features again high on the policy agenda in a lot of OECD countries. While deindustrialisation and offshoring have dominated the news about manufacturing during the past decades, recent years have witnessed a number of examples of companies re-shoring activities back to OECD...

World trade and production are increasingly structured around “global value chains” (GVCs). The last years have witnessed a growing number of case studies describing at the product level how production is internationally fragmented, but there is little evidence at the aggregate level on the...

The growing importance of global value chains (GVCs) in the international organisation of production increasingly challenges the traditional way of measuring countries’ export performance and hence international competitiveness. As a result of growing production fragmentation, a country’s...

World trade and production are increasingly structured around “global value chains” (GVCs). The last few years have witnessed a growing number of case studies describing at the product level how production is internationally fragmented, but there is little evidence at the aggregate level on...