Measuring country origins of factor content in bilateral or sector-level exports is important to understand evolution of regional and global value chains and the roles of individual country-sectors in these chains. This paper proposes a method to distinguish between measures based on backward...

While openness to trade is a well-recognized hallmark of the Asian growth model, another component of the model is a leapfrogging strategy—the use of policies to guide industrial structural transformation ahead of a country's factor endowment. Does the leapfrogging strategy work? Opinions vary...

China's exports have become increasingly sophisticated. This has generated anxiety in developed countries as the competitive pressure may be increasingly felt outside labor-intensive industries. Using product-level data on exports from different cities within China, this paper investigates the...

Most manufacturing activities use inputs from the financial and business services sectors. But these services sectors also compete for resources with manufacturing activities, provoking concerns about de-industrialization -- financial services in industrial countries like the United States and...

This paper provides both a conceptual framework for decomposing a country's gross exports into value-added components by source and a new bilateral database on value-added trade. Our parsimonious framework integrates all previous measures of vertical specialization and value-added trade in the...

This paper proposes a framework for gross exports accounting that breaks up a country's gross exports into various value-added components by source and additional double counted terms. By identifying which parts of the official trade data are double counted and the sources of the double...