Abstract

This paper proposes an accounting framework that breaks up a country's gross exports into various value-added components by source and additional double-counted terms. Our parsimonious framework bridges a gap between official trade statistics (in gross value terms) and national accounts (in value-added terms), and integrates all previous measures of vertical specialization and value-added trade in the literature into a unified framework. To illustrate the potential of such a method, we present a number of applications including re-computing revealed comparative advantages and the magnifying impact of multi-stage production on trade costs.

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Citation

Koopman, Robert, Zhi Wang, and Shang-Jin Wei. "Tracing Value-added and Double Counting in Gross Exports." American Economic Review 104, no. 2 (2014): 459-494.

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