This paper describes the main features of Global Value Chains (GVCs) in the euro area taken as a whole and compares with other large trade players like the US, China and Japan. In addition, the perspective of individual euro area countries is considered, with a focus on intra euro area linkages....

The production of most goods and services is nowadays vertically fragmented across different countries. This paper surveys the growing empirical literature on global value chains (GVCs), acknowledged as the current paradigm for the international organisation of production. The paper starts by...

This article takes the set of Portuguese markets and computes a new competition measure suggested by Boone (2008), which draws on the concept of profit elasticity to marginal costs in a given market. The article concludes that the majority of markets presented a reduction in competition in the...

This paper investigates a specific aspect of international production linkages that, following Hummels et al. (2001), is commonly designated as vertical specialization (VS) - the use of imported inputs to produce goods that are afterwards exported. We propose a relative measure of VS-based trade...

The paper compares the contribution of total factor productivity (TFP) to economic growth in the G7 countries, from 1960 until 2005. A dynamic world translog stochastic production frontier is computed through Bayesian statistical methods using panel data on 21 OECD economies. The real GDP growth...

This paper compares the international trade pattern of Portugal with the other three EU15 Cohesion countries - Spain, Greece and Ireland - over the last forty years. The paper adopts a fact-finding approach, investigating the degree of openness of these economies and making extensive use of the...

Expansion into foreign markets is a major decision for a firm and it involves choices about which countries to approach and which products to export. We use a new database that covers the universe of export transactions for firms located in Portugal for the period 1996-2005 in order to examine...

This paper analyses the relevance and the characteristics of the international fragmentation of production in the Portuguese economy. The empirical trade literature suggests different measures of fragmentation, changing the scope of the concept and using alternative sets of information. The...

Relative export structures have changed substantially over the last forty years. We map these changes using a new cross-country specialization index - the B* -, defined as the export weight of a given product on total domestic exports, “normalized” by the average weight across all countries...