Fragmentation, incomes and jobs: an analysis of European competitiveness

Marcel Timmer, Bart Los, Robert Stehrer and Gaaitzen de Vries

No 1615, Working Paper Series from European Central Bank

Abstract: Increasing fragmentation of production across borders is changing the nature of international competition. As a result, conventional indicators of competitiveness based on gross exports become less informative and new measures are needed. In this paper we propose an ex-post accounting framework of the value added and workers that are directly and indirectly related to the production of final manufacturing goods, called "manufactures GVC income" and "manufactures GVC jobs". We outline these concepts and provide trends in European countries based on a recent multi-sector input-output model of the world economy. We find that since 1995 revealed comparative advantage of the EU 27 is shifting to activities related to the production of non-electrical machinery and transport equipment. The workers involved in manufactures GVCs are increasingly in services, rather than manufacturing industries. We also find a strong shift towards activities carried out by high-skilled workers, highlighting the uneven distributional effects of fragmentation. The results show that a GVC perspective is needed to better inform the policy debates on competitiveness. JEL Classification: F6, J2, O47, O57

Keywords: European competitiveness; fragmentation; incomes and jobs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eur and nep-int
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (198)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1615.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Fragmentation, incomes, and jobs: an analysis of European competitiveness (2014)
Journal Article: Fragmentation, incomes and jobs: an analysis of European competitiveness (2013)
Working Paper: Fragmentation, Incomes and Jobs. An analysis of European competitiveness (2012)
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:ecb:ecbwps:20131615

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from European Central Bank 60640 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Official Publications ().