Output Upstreamness and Input Downstreamness of Industries/Countries in World Production

Using the world input–output tables available from the World Input–Output Database project, we quantify production line positions of thirty-five industries for forty countries and the rest of the world region over 1995 to 2011. In contrast to the previous related literature, we do not focus only on the output supply chain but also consider sectors’ input demand chains. This distinction is important because both these chains jointly constitute the entire production process, and the output sales structure of each sector is generally different from the structure of its inputs purchases. We use the output upstreamness (OU) measure of Antràs et al. and our proposed input downstreamness (ID) measure to quantify industry relative position, respectively, along the global output supply chain and the global input demand chain. Focusing on time variation, we find that potential input–output data uncertainties do not affect the observed patterns of the average OU and ID changes for the vast majority of countries and sectors. Further, for most countries the increase in OUs/IDs over time is found to be driven by a rise in cross-border intermediates sales/purchases.