Growing shares of international trade flows consist of intermediate and unfinished goods shipped from one country to another to combine manufacturing or services activities at home with those performed abroad. This configuration of the productive structure has been named "internationally...

In this paper we analyse the dynamics of trade patterns in the six largest industrialised countries and in eight fast growing Asian economies. For each of these countries we study the shape of the sectoral distribution of an index of trade specialisation and its evolution over time. Our analysis...