Positioning in Global Value Chains: World Map and Indicators. A new dataset available for GVC analyses

Recently, a strand of the international trade literature has developed measures of the positioning of countries and industries in Global Value Chains (GVCs) using the global Input-Output tables. These measures allow scholars from different research fields to conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses on GVCs, at the aggregate and sectoral level, and inform policymaking. To compute these indicators, a common approach is to consider the extent to which a country-industry pair sells its output for final use to consumers worldwide or instead sells intermediate inputs to other producing sectors in the world. Following this approach, we compute and make available to scholars a new dataset of GVC positioning indicators at the country-industry level based on the most used global Input-Output tables (WIOD, OECD, EORA, ADB). Specifically, we compute two popular measures: i) a measure of distance or upstreamness of a production sector from final demand, which was developed by Fally (2012), Antràs et al. (2012), and Antràs and Chor (2013, 2019); and ii) a measure of distance or downstreamness of a given sector from the economy’s primary factors of production (or sources of value-added), originally proposed by Fally (2012). These indicators are “ready-to-use” and can be freely downloaded from here (https://www.tradeconomics.com/position/). This work illustrates the indicators included in this new open access dataset and the methodologies applied, and provides an international comparison, by sectors and countries, of GVC positioning measures and their evolution over time. Lastly, we propose an empirical exercise to test the consistency of these measures with trade theory.