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The Global Forum website tries to keep track of the ever changing landscape of trade analysis, measurement of trade and trade statistics. The site keeps a database of links to over 150 relevant publications, reports, articles and speeches.

ALL AVAILABLE PUBLICATIONS

The full list of featured publications can be found HERE.

Publications

Give Credit Where the Credit is Due

Tracing value added in global production chains
Robert Koopman William Powers Shang-Jin Wei 2011

This paper provides both a conceptual framework for decomposing a country’s gross exports into value-added components by source and a new bilateral database on value-added trade. Our parsimonious framework integrates all previous measures of vertical specialization and value-added trade in the literature. To illustrate the potential of the decomposition, we present a number of applications including re-computing revealed comparative advantages... more »

Trade Patterns in East Asia

From trade in goods to trade in tasks
WTO IDE-Jetro 2011
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The geographical fragmentation of production has created a new trade reality. Often referred to as global value chains or vertical specialization, this fragmentation deepens the interdependency of trade relations and has many implications for how we understand trade policy. This book sheds light on the nature of this interdependency, and the contribution of trade to national economies. It illustrates the conjunction of technical, institutional and political changes that led to the emergence of production and trade networks in East Asia… more »

Trading Tasks: A Simple Theory of Offshoring

Gene Grossman Esteban Rossi-Hansberg 2008

Specialisation or division of labour is an important source of economic growth, but the degree of division of labour is constrained by the extent of the market. Trade in tasks represents the latest turn in a virtuous cycle of deepening specialisation, expansion of the market and productivity growth. It has attracted a lot of attention in the policy debate not for its contribution to international division of labour and productivity growth... more »