Recent empirical studies argue that the implementation of quality standards among agricultural exporters has the character of a fixed cost. However, this can be misleading if fixed costs are only understood in terms of required investments. Instead, we argue that standard adoption is the result...

International trade statistics and input-output tables are analyzed in order to test the hypothesis that international production networks have become more relevant. The share of imported inputs in the gross output value of the motor vehicle industry has grown significantly during the last two...