Vertical specialization is a measure of the import content of exports. Given the widely recognized importance of trade in tasks and global production networks, vertical specialization has recently gained the attention of international trade researchers and policy makers. In this note, we use...

With the steady growth of global value chains (GVCs), each country's trade now has a more complex relationship with the international division of labor. We decompose the employment effects of a country's trade into five components, specifically the labour content (1) in exports, (2) in imports,...

We adopt a ‘parsimonious' approach to measuring economic and social upgrading over 1990-2009 in four global value chains – apparel, mobile phones, agrofoods and tourism – based entirely on data published by international institutions. Economic upgrading is defined as a combination of...