Measuring the Upstreamness of Production and Trade Flows

By Pol Antràs, D. Chor, Thibault Fally, Russell Hillberry. 2012

957 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose two distinct approaches to the measurement of industry upstreamness (or average distance from final use) and show that they yield an equivalent measure. Furthermore, we provide two additional interpretations of this measure, one of them related to the concept of forward linkages in Input-Output analysis. On the empirical side, we construct this measure for 426 industries using the 2002 US Input-Output Tables. We also verify the stability of upstreamness across countries in the OECD STAN database, albeit with a more aggregated industry classification. Finally, we present an application that explores the determinants of the average upstreamness of exports at the country level using trade flows for 2002.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a131c16b3a2496d0680ddf5ca2e53e6a12941f6

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Citations in the corpus

Mapping Global Value Chains (2014, positive): “A similar index is used by Antràs et al. (2012) and defined as the country’s “upstreamness” in the value chain. The authors show that the results are similar to Fally (2011). And again, one could see a parallel with the backward and forward linkages as defined in the I/O literature.”
From micro to macro via production networks (2014, background): “The 1-10 labels give the ranking 10 top input suppliers: Wholesale Trade (1), Real Estate (2), Electric Power Generation and Distribution (3), Management of Companies and Enterprises (4), Iron and Steel Mills (5), Depository Credit Intermediation (6), Petroleum Refineries (7), Nondepository Credit I”
Output Upstreamness and Input Downstreamness of Industries/Countries in World Production (2017, positive): “We propose an ‘‘input downstreamness’’ (ID) measure of industries that quantifies this relative positioning, similar to the Antràs et al.’s (2012) OU measure. We call it an ID measure because in this case the focus is on the input demand chain, in which firms are located downstream with respect to H”
Growing like China: Firm performance and global production line position (2020, positive): “This correction accounts for industry-i flows across country borders, aswell as into and out of inventories; as Antràs et al. (2012) show, this is ection term implied by a proportionality assumption, that these industry-iflows are used as inputs across industries j in the same proportion aswhat is…”
GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS: A SURVEY OF DRIVERS AND MEASURES (2016, neutral): “Arndt and Kierzkowski (2001) and Antràs and Rossi-Hansberg (2009) review the contributions to the theory of international fragmentation of production using Ricardian and Heckscher-Ohlin type models.”
Measuring Smile Curves in Global Value Chains (2020, positive): “On the basis of the explanation of equations (12) and (13) above, the logic of APL (Dietzenbacher et al., 2005), and concept of “upstreamness” (Antras et al., 2012), the industrial value-added propagation length through both forward and backward industrial linkages can be defined by using a…”
Migrants, Ancestors, and Foreign Investments (2018, methodology): “Final goods and intermediate inputs are defined as 4-digit NAICS sectors with upstreamness index below and above 2, respectively, where we use the upstreamness index from Antràs et al. (2012). The number of country-county pairs that have an (non-zero) FDI link in the corresponding sector is 4,201 an”
HOW GLOBAL ARE GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS? A NEW APPROACH TO MEASURE INTERNATIONAL FRAGMENTATION (2015, background): “A related approach that is closer to measuring physical aspects of production is based on measuring the number of production stages a unit value will go through before it is sold for final use (Dietzenbacher and Romero, 2007; Fally, 2011; Antras et al., 2012).”