The emergence of global value chains has opened up new ways to achieve development and industrialization. However, new evidence shows that not all countries have gained from participating in global value chains, and that country-specific characteristics matter for economic upgrading in global...

Offshoring – the importing of intermediate materials and services – has expanded rapidly in most industrialized countries and its impact on the labor markets in these countries has been the source of enormous debate in both scholarly and popular circles. Since data on imported inputs at the...

Global value chains (GVCs) are international systems of production, typically governed by lead firms who coordinate elaborate networks of suppliers. The economic crisis has had a magnified effect on trade because of the prominence of GVC-based trade. This paper explores the role of GVCs in the...

The massive globalization of production led by large firms in industrialized countries, combined with the policy shift in developing countries toward export-oriented growth, has meant that economic development has increasingly become synonymous with “economic upgrading” within global...

Using a cross-section of more than 29,000 manufacturing firms in 64 developing and emerging countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper assesses whether trading firms have a female labor share premium relative to non-trading firms. It focuses on four types of trading firms:...

Using newly collected survey data on direct supplier-multinational linkages in Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Vietnam, this paper first evaluates whether foreign investors differ from domestic producers in terms of their potential to generate positive spillovers for...

Using a cross-section of more than 25,000 domestic manufacturing firms in 78 low and middle-income countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper assesses how mediating factors influence intra-industry productivity spillovers to domestic firms from foreign direct investment. It...

Using a cross-section of more than 40,000 manufacturing and services firms in 79 developing countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys Database, this paper assesses how firm location determines the likelihood and extent of exporting in developing countries. Descriptive statistics confirm...

The recent large and rapid slowdown in economic activity has resulted in even larger and more rapid declines in international trade. As world trade is set to rebound, this paper addresses three questions: (i) Will trade volumes rebound in a symmetric fashion as world economic growth rebounds?...

Countries subject to the same degree of exposure to globalization may experience very different levels of economic insecurity depending on social support or employment protections provided by the state or even due to insurance obtained by households. We identify five varieties of industrialized...