Trade in Value Added, Jobs and Investment

Paper Prepared for the IARIW 33rd General Conference, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, August 24-30, 2014

47 Pages Posted: 7 Jun 2017

See all articles by Nadim Ahmad

Nadim Ahmad

Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)

Jennifer Ribarsky

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

Date Written: august 6, 2014

Abstract

The increasing international fragmentation of production that has occurred in recent decades driven by technological progress, cost, access to resources and markets, trade policy reforms, and indeed emerging economies, has challenged our conventional wisdom on how we look at and interpret trade. Traditional measures of trade, record gross flows of goods and services each and every time they cross borders leading to what many describe as a ‘multiple’ counting of trade, which may lead to misguided policy measures. To respond to this challenge a number of initiatives have been launched in recent years that attempt to measure, or perhaps more accurately ‘estimate’, what has become known as ‘trade in value-added’. These have all helped to shed light on the importance of accounting for global value chains and have helped raise awareness of a growing need to mainstream the production of these estimates within the international statistics system. Responding to these challenges on 15 March 2012 the OECD and WTO undertook to collaborate on the development of estimates of trade in value-added (TiVA), resulting in a first release of a preliminary database on 16 January 2013 and a subsequent update in May 2013. This paper describes some of the key results of that work, and the methodology used. It also describes the detailed assumptions behind the methodology to necessarily deal with the treatment of data, and also the initiatives launched to improve the quality of those assumptions and the underlying data. The paper also describes extensions of the work to consider ‘trade in jobs’, and, proposes a framework to develop Extended national Supply Use tables that capture flows of primary/property income, so providing a mechanism to analyse the links between investment and global value chains. While TiVA estimates have been able to shed important light on our understanding of international trade and its relation to activity and competitiveness, in particular the importance of recognising the importance of imports to exports, and, so, the hitherto hidden costs of protectionism as well as the benefits of trade liberalisation, particularly in services, they do not reveal the full picture. With significant shares of exports being driven by foreign affiliates, TiVA estimates have also revealed the importance of going beyond just value-added towards income, in order to capture flows outside of conventional international trade statistics, such as the repatriation of profits related to the use of non-produced knowledge based assets (e.g. brands) and, indeed, the repatriation of profits related to the use of produced knowledge based assets (e.g. software) that are (often incorrectly) not recorded as receipts from exports of services.

Suggested Citation

Ahmad, Nadim and Ribarsky, Jennifer, Trade in Value Added, Jobs and Investment (august 6, 2014). Paper Prepared for the IARIW 33rd General Conference, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, August 24-30, 2014 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2981581 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2981581

Nadim Ahmad (Contact Author)

Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) ( email )

2 rue Andre Pascal
Paris Cedex 16, 75775
France

Jennifer Ribarsky

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( email )

2 rue Andre` Pascal
Paris, 75116
France

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