Participation and positioning of agri-food firms in global value chains: Measures and data

Value chains have become increasingly global over the past decades. Production processes are incrementally fragmented across countries, and more and more firms search for suppliers and customers beyond the domestic market. Still, there is strong heterogeneity in the degree at which individual firms are involved in global value chains (GVCs). Measuring firms' participation and position in GVCs requires both firm-level data on international trade flows and detailed input-output tables. While the former are usually well reflected in countries' customs data, the latter usually aggregate economic activities into a small number of large sectors. This broad definition of sectors/industries narrows down the possibility to differentiate between upstream and downstream activities and products, which is essential for measuring the implication in GVCs of firms from a specific sector or industry. In this paper, we develop a method based on the proportionality hypothesis that permits to properly match the rich U.S. input-output table, where industries/sectors are defined at a very narrow level, with detailed French firm-level trade data. Based on correspondences between industries in U.S. and French data, we rewrite the U.S. input-output table at the level of detail at which industries are defined in the French customs data. We apply the result to the case of the agri-food sector, and characterize the participation and positioning of French agri-food firms in GVCs.