Global Value Chains have proliferated economic policy debates. Yet a key concept - trade in value added - is likely mismeasured because of sectoral aggregation bias stemming from reliance on inputoutput tables. This paper uses comprehensive firm-level data on both domestic and international...

This paper studies the great collapse in value added trade using a structural decomposition analysis. We show that changes in vertical specialisation accounted for almost half of the great trade collapse, while the previous literature on gross trade has mainly focused on final expenditure,...