Trade in value-added and the welfare gains of international fragmentation

Arnold Njike

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In order to take profit from the differences in factor endowments and technology that exist between countries, firms delocalize or externalize a share of their goods’ production process to other countries. This phenomenon is so widespread today that very few manufactured goods are produced entirely within the borders of a single country. We examine in this paper the macroeconomic gains related to this phenomenon by calculating the net share of international fragmentation in the welfare gains of trade. To do so, we propose a model that allows us to identify all the components related to international fragmentation in these welfare gains, something that most of the classical trade models fail to do. We show that the net share of international fragmentation in the welfare gains of trade represents on average 22% of the gains of trade, a way lower figure than the share that could be inferred from standard trade models. The shutdown of international fragmentation would, therefore, only reduce the average real wage by 3%.

Keywords: Global supply chains; Welfare effects of trade; Trade in value-added; Computable general equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F1 F6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100427/1/MPRA_paper_100427.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:pra:mprapa:100427

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().