Vertical Specialization and Gains from Trade

Patrick Alexander

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: Multi-stage production is widely recognized as an important feature of the modern global economy. This feature has been incorporated into many state-of-the-art quantitative trade models, and has been shown to deliver significant additional gains from international trade. Meanwhile, specialization across stages of production, or “vertical specialization," has been largely ignored in these models. In this paper, I provide evidence that vertical specialization is a salient feature in the international trade data, which implies that the assumption made in standard models is inaccurate. I then develop a model with multi-stage production where country-level productivity differences provide a basis for vertical specialization and additional global gains from trade beyond those currently accounted for in standard models. I quantify the gains from vertical specialization according to the model. Despite the importance of vertical specialization in the data, I find that the average gains from trade are only slightly higher than the gains suggested by standard models with multi-stage production. Moreover, much of the impact of across-stage specialization is largely offset by across-sector intermediate input linkages. These results suggest that vertical specialization is not the source of missing gains from trade that have recently confounded trade economists.

Keywords: Economic models; International topics; Trade Integration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F11 F14 F60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/swp2017-17.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Vertical specialisation and gains from trade (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bca:bocawp:17-17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0G9, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (website@bank-banque-canada.ca).