Fragmentation, Incomes and Jobs: An Analysis of European Competitiveness

By M. Timmer, B. Los, Robert Stehrer, G. D. de Vries. Social Science Research Network, 2013

425 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increasing fragmentation of production across borders is changing the nature of international competition. As a result, conventional indicators of competitiveness based on gross exports are becoming less informative and new measures are needed. This paper proposes an ex-post accounting framework of the value added and workers that are directly and indirectly related to the production of final manufacturing goods. The framework focuses on manufactures global value chain income and manufactures global value chain jobs. The paper outlines these concepts and provides trends in European countries based on a recent multi-sector, input-output model of the world economy. The analysis finds that since 1995, revealed comparative advantage of the European Union 27 is shifting to activities related to the production of nonelectrical machinery and transport equipment. The workers involved in manufactures global value chains are increasingly in services, rather than manufacturing industries. The analysis also finds a strong shift toward activities carried out by high-skilled workers, highlighting the uneven distributional effects of fragmentation. The results show that a global value chain perspective is needed to inform the policy debates on competitiveness.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c2aeccbe28eb700a99e58cbcfc2dfc483dd90dd

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Citations in the corpus

The “Bad Labor” Footprint: Quantifying the Social Impacts of Globalization (2014, background): “This is mainly due to the fact that developing countries export large amounts of primary products with low value added and high labor intensity, while developed countries export goods and services with high value added and lower labor intensity [62,63].”
HOW GLOBAL ARE GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS? A NEW APPROACH TO MEASURE INTERNATIONAL FRAGMENTATION (2015, methodology): “…Inc. DOI: 10.1111/jors.12121 66 Rossi-Hansberg, 2008; Costinot, Vogel, and Wang, 2013) and empirical work (Feenstra and Hanson, 1999; Hummels, Ishii, and Yi, 2001; Johnson and Noguera, 2012a, 2012b; Baldwin and Lopez-Gonzalez, 2013; Timmer et al., 2013, 2014; Koopman, Wang, and Wei, 2014).”
The Relationship Between Global Value Chains and Productivity (2017, background): “Chart 4: Regional Shares in World GVC Income for all Manufactures (per cent) Source: Timmer et al. (2013) Note: GVC income is defined as value-added in the production of final manufacturing goods.”
The Global MRIO Lab – charting the world economy (2017, background): “Johnson and Noguera (2012), Timmer et al. (2013) and Koopman et al. (2014), for example, argued in various ways that conventional indicators based on gross exports of countries do not tellmuch about the competitiveness of countries and the economic dependencies between pairs of countries anymore.”
Tracing CO2 emissions in global value chains (2018, background): “Studies on GVCs have focused on the creation and distribution of value added, employment, and income (OECD 2013; Timmer et al. 2013; Ferrarini and Hummels 2014).”
Output Upstreamness and Input Downstreamness of Industries/Countries in World Production (2017, neutral): “The literature focusing on trade in intermediates is by now quite large and is rapidly growing (see e.g., Jones and Kierzkowski, 1990; Hummels et al., 2001; Antràs et al., 2006; Baldwin, 2006; Koopman et al., 2011; Johnson and Noguera, 2012; Timmer et al., 2012).”
Labor Embodied in Trade (2015, background): “Nonetheless, empirical analyses of global socioeconomic impacts of international trade are scarce (Timmer et al. 2012; Foster-McGregor et al. 2013; and the recently published The Labor Footprint of Nations by Alsamawi et al. [2014]).”
An Illustrated User Guide to the World Input–Output Database: The Case of Global Automotive Production (2015, positive): “It has been used to describe trends in global supply chain trade and research into the formation of regional production clusters in the world economy (e.g. Baldwin and Lopez-Gonzales, 2013; Timmer et al., 2013; and Los et al., 2015), as well as analyzing the domestic value-added content of gross exp”
Quantifying International Production Sharing at the Bilateral and Sector Levels (2013, positive): “Timmer et al. (2013, 2014) decompose manufacturing final goods production based on backward industrial linkages.”