Trade in Value Added : Developing New Measures of Cross-Border Trade

This volume includes papers that were first presented and discussed at a workshop on 'The Fragmentation of Global Production and Trade in Value- Added: Developing New Measures of Cross Border Trade', held at the World Bank in Washington, DC, on 9 to 10 June, 2011. This publication is structured as follows: chapter one gives and overview of measuring trade in value added when production is fragmented across countries. Chapter two discusses policy rationale and methodological challenges towards the measurement of trade in value-added terms. Chapter three highlights the importance of measuring trade in value added. Chapter four computes and analyses the value-added content of trade. Chapter five proposes an accounting framework for estimating the domestic and foreign content share in a country's exports when processing trade is prevalent. Chapter six provides estimates of foreign and domestic content in Mexico's manufacturing exports that take into account the import content in production under the maquiladora and Programa de Importacion Temporal para Producir Articulos de Exportacion (PITEX) programmes. Chapter seven gives empirical evidence that the standard gravity equation performs poorly by some measures when it is applied to bilateral flows where parts and components trade is important. It also provides a simple theoretical foundation for a modified gravity equation that is suited to explain trade where international supply chains are important. Chapter eight provides methodological guidelines on how to compute import coefficients at the level of the firm and shows how trade micro-data, can refine the aggregate nature of the indicators in input-output (IO) tables, by increasing their granularity. Chapter nine reviews the availability of underlying source data, summarizes the assumptions and describes the harmonization techniques used. Chapter ten gives three-stage reconciliation method to construct a time series international IO database. Chapter eleven gives direct measurement for collecting product- and firm-level statistics on value added and business function outsourcing and offshoring. Chapter twelve focuses on statistics and measures that are developed and used for defining and monitoring trade policy and economic development. Each chapter gives references at the end.