This volume was prepared by Inga Heiland while she was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in July 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It comprises five chapters addressing one or more aspects of international trade and...

Global value chains (GVCs) have shaped the dynamics of globalisation in recent years. This paper reviews key concepts and tools to measure countries’ involvement in GVCs, explores recent trends and investigates the underlying drivers of GVC participation empirically. The analysis in the paper...

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...

Global trade growth has slowed since 2012 relative both to its strong historical performance and to overall economic growth. This paper aims to quantify the role of weak economic growth and changes in its decomposition in accounting for the slowdown in trade using a reduced form and a structural...

Recent disruptions to global value chains (GVCs) have raised an important question: Can decoupling from GVCs increase a country’s welfare by reducing its exposure to foreign supply shocks? We use a quantitative trade model to simulate GVCs decoupling, defined as increased barriers to global...

A few economists, researchers and many pundits in international business and international economics suppose that international trade has either begun to decrease or is about to decrease due to changes in the structure of the world economy. This paper rejects the empirical basis of this...

The half century leading up to the crisis of 2008-2009 was the best such period in world economic history, especially in the Asia Pacific. Peace and relative economic stability permitted unprecedented liberalization, economic integration, and advances in productivity and growth. But the...

Global Value Chains (GVCs) have become a central topic in trade and development policy but little is known about their actual impact on economic performance because data availability has been limited. Using a new unique set of Inter- Country Input-Output tables with extensive country coverage, I...