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...

Bilateral trade imbalances are determined by aggregate trade imbalances, production and expenditure patterns, and trade barriers. We calibrate a dynamic many-sector trade model to match the recent sectoral trade and production shares of 40 economies and the rest of the world. Through a variance...

Bilateral trade balances often play an important role in the international trade policy debate. Academic economists understand that they are misleading indicators of competitiveness and of the gains from trade. However, they also recognize their political relevance, calling for accurate...

Bilateral trade balances often play an important role inthe international trade policy debate. Disturbingly, several studies argue that the gravity model of trade fails when confronted with bilateral trade balances data, dubbing this "The Mystery of the Excess Trade Balances". Capitalizing on...

Bilateral trade balances often play an important role in the international trade policy debate. Academic economists understand that they are misleading indicators of competitiveness and of the gains from trade. However, they also recognize their political relevance, calling for accurate...

The impact of globalization in terms of bilateral trade is a renowned theoretical underpinning in the literature. Nevertheless, testing a trade integration model of bilateral trade is not sufficiently well estimated with the Bayesian approach to provide pragmatic evidence of trade integration...

Economic theory suggests including domestic trade flows when estimating structural gravity models. The inclusion of domestic trade flows helps to identify parameters that cannot be estimated with international trade flows alone. The complication is that domestic trade flows can be measured...

Gravity as both fact and theory is one of the great success stories of recent research on international trade, and has featured prominently in the policy debate over Brexit. We first review the facts, noting the overwhelming evidence that trade tends to fall with distance. We then introduce some...

Based on an empirical gravity model of sectoral bilateral trade, we uncover three features of bilateral trade balances. First, the difficulty of gravity models in fitting the observed level of bilateral balances is likely due to the presence of unobservable bilateral trade costs. Second, the...