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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 »

Income Distribution, Product Quality and International Trade

Pablo D. Fajgelbaum Gene M. Grossman Elhanan Helpman 2009

We develop a framework for studying trade in vertically and horizontally differentiated products. In our model, consumers with heterogeneous incomes and tastes purchase a homogeneous good as well as making a discrete choice of quality and variety of a differentiated product. The distribution of preferences in the population generates a nested logit demand structure... more »

Trade in Tasks

Rainer Lanz Sébastien Miroudot Hildegunn K. Nordås 2011

The nature of international trade is changing. For centuries, trade mostly entailed an exchange of goods. Now it increasingly involves bits of value being added in many different locations, or what might be called trade in tasks… more »

Value Chains in East Asian Production Networks

An International Input-Output Model Based Analysis
Zhi Wang William Powers* Shang-Jin Wei 2009

This paper extends the quantitative measures of vertical specialization proposed by Hummels, Ishii, and Yi (2001) into a framework that includes many countries based on an international input-output model. It not only distributes foreign value added in a country’s exports to its original sources, but also further decomposes domestic value added in a country’s exports into direct exports and indirect intermediate exports via third countries... more »

Vertical Specialization and Global Value Chains

OECD 2009

Advances in transportation and communication technology, together with the low barriers to trade, have contributed in the recent decades to the emergence of a new structure of production and international trade. In several industries, production processes have broken up into several stages or ‘production tasks’ that are no longer closely tightened in time and space… more »