Increasing fragmentation of production across borders is changing the nature of international competition. As a result, conventional indicators of competitiveness based on gross exports become less informative and new measures are needed. In this paper we propose an ex-post accounting framework...

There has been an ongoing trend towards increasing internationalisation of production over the past two decades or so. This implies that countries become more dependent on demand from foreign countries but also that countries and industries are able to source intermediates from different...

Based on recent approaches measuring the factor content of trade when intermediates are traded this paper provides an approach to decompose the value added and factor (capital, high, medium and low educated labour) content of trade into foreign and domestic components. This adds to the...

In this paper we examine the link between international outsourcing – or offshoring – and the skill structure of labour demand for a sample of 40 countries over the period 1995 2009. The paper uses data from the recently compiled World-Input-Output-Database (WIOD) to estimate a system of...

This paper examines industrialization trends in developing countries. It uses the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database, which provides time series of employment and real and nominal value added annually by 12 sectors in 51 countries for the period 1990-2018. Until the early 2000s...

This paper examines the trends in skill and activity upgrading in global value chains (GVCs) and the drivers of upgrading in Asian economies. It uses the newly constructed ADB Multi-Region Input- Output Tables as well as occupation data on jobs by educational attainment and business activities,...

Every once in a while, national governments face difficult decision problems regarding financial support of important domestic firms or even entire national national industries. Similar problems are often faced by regional or urban governments. Given these problems, it is important to get...

Shift-Share analysis is a well-known methodology frequently used to obtain insights into the determinants of regional growth processes. It can address many issues, such as output growth, employment growth and productivity growth. After the initial equation proposed by Dunn (1960), several...

We investigate how variety affects the innovation output of a region. Borrowing arguments from theories of recombinant innovation, we expect that related variety will enhance innovation as related technologies are more easily recombined into a new technology. However, we also expect that...

Politicians differ in their ability to implement some policy. In an election, candidates make commitments regarding the plans they will try to implement if elected. These serve as a signal of true ability. In equilibrium, candidates make overambitious promises. The candidate with the highest...