Global production sharing is determined by international cost differences and frictions related to the costs of unbundling stages spatially. The interaction between these forces depends on engineering details of the production process with two extremes being ‘snakes’ and ‘spiders’....

This paper studies the investment creation and investment diversion effects of the EU's Single Market programme (EU92). We find suggestive, but not conclusive, evidence indicating that EU92 may have led to investment diversion in the economies of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and...

The authors study interactions between goods trade and international factor mobility in a context suggestive of transition in Central and Eastern Europe. If complementarities between skilled labor and capital are strong--e.g., owing to externalities between skilled labor and costs of absorbing...

The impact of technological progress on jobs and wages has been subject to much empirical and some theoretical work. However, most of this literature has not addressed the general equilibrium interplay between the productive factors that are affected, the sectors in which these factors are used,...

Global supply chains (GSCs) are transforming the world. This paper explores why they emerged, why they are significant and future directions they are likely to take along with some implications for policy. After putting global supply chains into an historical perspective, the paper presents an...

This paper studies tax competition in an economic geography model that allows for agglomeration economies with trade costs and heterogeneous firms. We find that the Nash equilibrium involves the large country charging a higher tax than the small nation. Lower trade costs lead to an...

Revolutionary transformations of industry and trade occurred from 1985 to the late-1990s -- the regionalisation of supply chains. Before 1985, successful industrialisation meant building a domestic supply chain. Today, industrialisers join supply chains and grow rapidly because offshored...

Unilateral tariff liberalisation by developing nations is pervasive but our understanding of it is shallow. This paper strives to partly redress this lacuna on the theory side by introducing three novel political economy mechanisms with particular emphasis is on the role of production...

This paper applies a novel empirical approach to characterising the horizontal-ness and vertical-ness of affiliates based on Yeaple’s complex FDI concept. In its simplest form, horizontal-ness is measured as affiliates’ local sales share while their vertical-ness is measures as their share...

The trade linked to international production networks – supply-chain trade for short – is associated with momentous global economic changes. This paper presents a portrait of the global pattern of supply-chain trade and how it has evolved since 1995. The paper draws on a variety of data...