International trade in manufacturing goods has risen strongly over the past decades, contributing to the expansion of global value chains (GVCs). This paper studies how two factors contributed to this rise since 1970: (i) declining "border effects" that are arguably related to the ICT revolution...

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,...