This paper unveils a systematic pattern in the People's Republic of China's (PRC) processing trade. In a cross-section of the PRC's provinces, the average distance traveled by processing imports (import distance) is negatively correlated with the average distance traveled by processing exports...

In this paper we argue that export data are an inadequate tool to measure a country's international competitiveness when external trade is dominated by export-processing trade. Export data de not necessarily reflect the value produced in an exporting country, but rather capture the gross value...

In a seminal contribution, Yi (2003) has shown that vertically specialized trade should be more sensitive to changes in trade costs than regular trade. Yet empirical evidence of this remains remarkably scant. This paper uses data from China's processing trade regime to analyze the role of trade...

The collapse of trade during the great recession of 2008-2009 has raised the question of whether the rise of global value chains (GVCs) has increased or accelerated the international transmission of business cycle shocks. In this paper, we empirically investigate two channels through which a...

The core idea behind the paper is that trade policy matters for the organization of global value chains, a notion largely neglected by economists but which has important implications for our understanding of trade and the international transmission of trade policy shocks. We develop a...

The core idea behind the paper is that trade policy matters for the organization of global value chains, a notion largely neglected by economists but which has important implications for our understanding of trade and the international transmission of trade policy shocks. We develop a...