The emergence of global value chains has opened up new ways to achieve development and industrialization. However, new evidence shows that not all countries have gained from participating in global value chains, and that country-specific characteristics matter for economic upgrading in global...

This paper studies the trade effects of Covid-19 using monthly disaggregated trade data for 28 countries and multiple trading partners from the beginning of the pandemic to June 2020. Regression results based on a sector-level gravity model show that the negative trade effects induced by...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam, rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...

Using a cross-section of more than 29,000 manufacturing firms in 64 developing and emerging countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper assesses whether trading firms have a female labor share premium relative to non-trading firms. It focuses on four types of trading firms:...

This paper examines the role of multinational enterprises in sustainability reporting. The study assesses how multinational enterprise status correlates with a company's average disclosure rate and probability of reporting on economic, labor and social, environmental, and governance indicators....

Using newly collected survey data on direct supplier-multinational linkages in Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Vietnam, this paper first evaluates whether foreign investors differ from domestic producers in terms of their potential to generate positive spillovers for...

Using a cross-section of more than 25,000 domestic manufacturing firms in 78 low and middle-income countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper assesses how mediating factors influence intra-industry productivity spillovers to domestic firms from foreign direct investment. It...

Production of goods and services has increasingly globalized since the 1970s but is hard to measure. Standard approaches either overstate the degree of backward integration or underestimate the involvement of some industries, especially services, in Global Value Chain (GVC) activity. To correct...

This paper studies global trade responses to the US-China trade war. It estimates the tariff impacts on product-level exports to the US, China, and rest of world. On average, countries decreased exports to China and increased exports to the US and rest of world. Most countries export products...

Two otherwise identical firms that enter the same market in different months, one in January and one in December, will report dramatically different annual sales for the first calendar year of operations. This partial year effect in annual data leads to downward biased observations of the level...