Imports are linked to higher cost mark-ups and firm profits, and the gains from such non-competitive imports - the result of offshoring - are increasingly associated with the reinvestment of these higher profits. Our regression analysis of 35 US manufacturing and service industries over the...

Aid for Trade is widely heralded as a success in promoting increased trade by developing countries. Increased trade, however, does not automatically translate into greater prosperity for workers or local communities. In a world characterized by global value chains (GVCs) in which large lead...

The author argues in this paper that the quantitative rise in world trade openness since 1980 may be less significant than the qualitative change in the structure of world trade, specifically the rise in intermediate goods trade resulting form the breaking up of the production process into...

The general failure of economists to predict the financial crash of 2008 has given rise to a wide-ranging debate over the need for methodological reform. But has this debate been adequate to the task at hand? We introduce a framework for classifying methodological debates according to their...

Abstract The massive globalization of production led by large firms in industrialized countries, combined with the policy shift in developing countries toward export-oriented growth, has meant that economic development has increasingly become synonymous with “economic upgrading” within...

Abstract Vertical specialization is a measure of the import content of exports. Given the widely recognized importance of trade in tasks and global production networks, vertical specialization has recently gained the attention of international trade researchers and policy makers. In this note,...