Global Value Chains News

On May 26 The Economist featured an article on China's attempts to mitigate its exposure to Western influence, using data from the Penn World Table version 10.0.

As part of Marcel Timmer's VICI-project, a long-run time series of World Input-Output Tables for the period 1965-2000 has been constructed.

The original website of the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), previously hosted at www.wiod.org, has been migrated to the GGDC website. An archived version of the original website is still available, but will no longer be updated. All information and...

The Asian Development bank (ADB), Research institute for Global Value Chains at the university of international business and economics (RI GVC), the World trade organization (WTO), the institute of Developing economies – Japan external trade organization...

Last week, the IMF Economic Review published a new paper by GGDC researchers Marcel Timmer, Bart Los and Gaaitzen de Vries, co-authored with wiiw's Robert Stehrer. The paper proposes a new way to account for changes in the global trade elasticity, the...

In early December, several media outlets paid attention to a report written by Bart Los and Jouke van Dijk (UG, Faculty of Spatial Sciences), about the employment impact of the large NortH2 hydrogen project for the North of the Netherlands in general and...

On September 1, Robert Inklaar has taken over as director of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) from Marcel Timmer.

Bart Los and Xianjia Ye published an article in ESB, the major Dutch magazine on economic policy. They provide indicators for the economic importance of Italy and Spain for the Dutch and German economies. Using methods for bilateral dependencies in...

On June 4, Bart Los gave a seminar at the London office of the Office for National Statistics. It was a seminar in the series organized by the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, an initiative to which Marcel Timmer and Bart contributed. Bart's talk...

In a recently published paper in the Review of World Economics, Stefan Pahl and Marcel Timmer document a new set of stylized facts on vertical specialisation since 1970. They construct new data to estimate the domestic value-added content in exports (VAX-D...

On February 7, the New York Times published an article on regional implications of Brexit. It featured a map on regional economic Brexit risks in Europe, taken from the Papers in Regional Science article from 2018, co-authored by GGDC-members Wen Chen and...

Peter IJtsma, Bart Los and Marcel Timmer, joint with Peter Levell (IFS), published a paper in Fiscal Studies on the degree to which the UK participates in global value chains and what this implies for a post-Brexit trade policy. They argue that the UK will...

Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries, together with the OECD's Sébastien Miroudot, have published a paper in the Journal of Economic Geography on functional specialization in trade. They propose a new measure that describes in what type of activities a...

The Socio-Economic Council of the Northern Netherlands, SER-NN, organized a meeting on November 26 about the possible impact of Brexit on three Northern provinces of The Netherlands. Bart Los gave a talk and participated in a panel with representatives...

On November 15, Bart Los received the award for the best paper in the 2017 volume of the journal Regional Studies. He had co-authored the winning paper, The Mismatch between Local Voting and the Local Economic Consequences of Brexit, with Philip McCann...

Today, the Financial Times reports on new research by Jonathan Eaton (U. of Pennsylvania) and Samuel Kortum (Yale) using data from the World Input Output Database. Eaton and Kortum find that trade volumes in services is heavily affected by distance. So if,...

In an article in the (Dutch) Volkskrant, Marcel Timmer is interviewed on the consequences of the trade negotiations between the NAFTA countries, the United States, Mexico and Canada. He argues that the inter-connected nature of trade and production means...

In research published in the Journal of Development Economics, Laurie Reijnders and Gaaitzen de Vries analyse the worldwide increase in the share of non-routine jobs. They find that, in particular, technology has led to a global increase in this share,...

At the latest conference of the European Regional Science Association (ERSA), Bart Los, together with Phillip McCann, Raquel Ortega-Argilés and Frank van Oort, organised a session on Brexit. The presentations focused on (e.g.) the regional disparities of...

At the latest General Conference of the International Association of Research in Income and Wealth, GGDC researchers contributed substantially to the program:

Marcel Timmer is interviewed by the Dutch newspaper NRC on the effects of import tariffs on cars. These have been threatened by Trump and would aim to shift car production to the United States. Such tariffs would hurt Americans by making cars more...

Marcel Timmer, Robert Inklaar and Jop Woltjer were amongst the presenters at the Fifth World KLEMS conference, organised by Dale Jorgenson and others at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government on June 4–5. Presentations included discussion of the...

On May 23, Thomas Piketty gave the Maddison lecture, on the topic of globalization and inequality. See here for some highlights and how Piketty's work relates to research of GGDC.

In the IMF's latest World Economic Outlook, its chapter 3 on manufacturing jobs relies heavily on data provided by the GGDC, including the World Input-Output Database and the GGDC Productivity Level Database, as well as relying on the data from the World...

Today, Bart Los will present new research jointly with Marcel Timmer on Measuring Bilateral Exports of Value Added at a conference organised by the NBER and CRIW on the Challenges of Globalization in the Measurement of National Accounts, which brings...

On March 2, Bart Los gave a seminar at the European Commission, Directorate General of Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN) on the usefulness of the World Input-Output Database for tracking European competitiveness in a world characterised by global...

Today the GGDC released the Socio-Economic Accounts (SEA), part of the WIOD 2016 release.

A recent report on the importance of trading links with Europe for the Scottish economy emphasises the importance of taking a global value chain perspective to analysing this topic. The report relies on the WIOD database to make these arguments.

The recent research by Wen Chen, Bart Los and others about how different regions in the UK and in Europe could be affected by Brexit has attracted substantial media attention, from The Guardian, the New Statesman, the Evening Standard, Metro, The...

How important is the trade relationship between the Netherlands and United States for American jobs? In a recent tweet, the Dutch Embassy in Washington DC claims that 740 000 American jobs depend on economies ties with the Netherlands: due to exports from...

In a new paper in Papers in Regional Science and a column on VoxEU, Bart Los and Wen Chen – together with Phil McCann, Raquel Ortega-Argilés, Mark Thissen and Frank van Oort – show how the impact of Brexit on labour income varies across the different...

Where the UK government was not able to come up with a clear estimate of the impact of Brexit across sectors, Bart Los and Wen Chen, collaborating with Philip McCann (Sheffield) and Raquel Ortega-Argilés (Birmingham) have done so in a new policy briefing....

The WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) just released its biannual yearbook in a public launching event. This year's topic is "Intangible Capital in Global Value Chains"; the WIPO report  can be downloaded here. The underlying report, written...

Phillip McCann (Sheffield) will today present joint research with Bart Los at a conference that is organized as part of The UK in a Changing Europe initiative. The presentation focuses on the regional exposure to Brexit of regions in the UK and in Europe, ...

Gaaitzen de Vries presented recent work with Sébastien Miroudot and Marcel Timmer on functional specialization in international trade at an UNCTAD expert meeting on October 26. The meeting included contributions from the minister of industry and...

Bart Los presents today at a workshop organised by IVIE in Valencia on the World Input Output Database and the research on 'peak trade', based on the paper An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release.

Bart Los presented at the European Regional Science Association Congress held in the last week of August, in Groningen. Bart presented recent work on the "GDP exposure to Brexit" of regions on both sides of the Channel. The study, co-authored by Wen Chen...

Marcel Timmer and Robert Inklaar each organised a session at the 4th annual conference of the Society for Economic Measurement, at MIT, from July 26 to 28. The session by Marcel Timmer was on trade and global value chains and included presentations by Robe...

Gaaitzen de Vries has been appointed special term Research Professor of Global Value Chains at the University of International Business and Economics, Beijing. The centre in which he participates is dedicated to research activities on the development of...

Marcel Timmer presents on 'International Production Fragmentation and the Global Trade Slowdown' at a conference at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Other presenters include Sam Kortum, Stephen Yeaple and Costas Arkolakis. This...

Global trade is no longer expanding as it used to, in part because Chinese consumption is shifting towards services produced at home (see the underlying paper). The Financieel Dagblad discusses this research in an article about Dutch exports to Germany....

Marcel Timmer and Bart Los are contributors to two of the 25 winning consortia that will conduct research on the consequences of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union for the British ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council). Timmer will...

The Reformatorisch Dagblad reported last Saturday about the stagnating growth of world trade, interviewing Marcel Timmer about the drivers and consequences of this development. For the research by Timmer and other about the drivers of the global trade...

Bart Los is presenting today at the Eurostat conference on New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics 2017 on how the research on global value chains has used existing data and how official statistics could be improved to shed better light on...

Wen Chen, Reitze Gouma and Marcel Timmer have prepared two reports as background for the upcoming World Intellectual Property Report 2017. The reports aim to measure the importance of intangible assets in global value chains. They were presented on March...

Marcel Timmer today presents new research, jointly by Wen Chen and Bart Los, on measuring the returns to intangible capital in global value chains at a conference of the NBER's Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW) on Measuring and Accounting...

Today, Gaaitzen de Vries will give a lecture in the World Trade Organization's Trade Dialogues Lectures. His contribution to this series, which has seen earlier contributions by David Dorn (U. of Zürich), Eric Verhoogen (Columbia) and others, focuses on...

In an interview with the (Dutch) Financieel Dagblad, Marcel Timmer argues that the current era of production fragmentation makes it less likely that a trade war will flare up: "Lobbying for protection from foreign competition only makes sense if a...

On January 13, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) held a workshop on the opportunities for research using linked employer-employee data (LEED). This workshop was co-organized by Gaaitzen de Vries. One of the strengths of LEED is that it is possible to track...

Gaaitzen de Vries spoke last Monday at the World Bank conference on 'Making Global Value Chains work for Development'. This conference brought together experts discussing the measurement, trends and determinants of global value chains. Gaaitzen talked...

On June 28–30, we organise a conference to celebrate the 25 year anniversary of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) in Het Kasteel in Groningen. The conference will feature many prominent speakers: Dale Jorgenson (Harvard) will give an...

NRC, a Dutch daily newspaper, has just published an interview with Marcel Timmer centred around the report on peak trade, An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release. The title of the article is telling: "The politician who aims...

VoxEU now also has a column on the recent report on peak trade, An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release.

Marcel Timmer is due to speak at the Fourth IMF Statistical Forum, "Lifting the small boats: statistics for inclusive growth". This forum addresses current challenges faced by statisticians in capturing globalization, inequality, financial inclusion, and...

The (Dutch) Financieel Dagblad reports on new GGDC research: An Anatomy of the Global Trade Slowdown based on the WIOD 2016 Release. This paper is based on the newly released WIOD data and analyses why global trade has not grown as rapidly since 2008 as...

A new version of the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) has been released. Important features are the coverage of a more recent period, 2000–2014, more extensive data for 43 countries (rather than 40) and 56 sectors (rather than 35), and a switch to the...

Bart Los presents at the OECD's 31st Meeting of the Working Party on Territorial Indicators on new indicators of participation in global value chains at the regional level. These are based on regionally disaggregated World Input Output Tables that have...

Laurie Reijnders, Marcel Timmer and Xianjia Ye have written a column for VOX EU based on their most recent research. They argue that the perspective of global value chains allows one to distinguish bias in technical change from the effects of offshoring....

Bart Los, Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries have published in the  American Economic Review . Their article is title "Tracing Value-Added and Double Counting in Gross Exports: Comment" and they propose a method that provides a clear definition of...

Marcel Timmer gave a keynote lecture on this topic at a conference organised by the Bank of Lithuania, which also included speakers such as Richard Baldwin, Fabio Ghironi, and Laura Alfaro. The presented research, jointly by Timmer, Bart Los, Gaaitzen de...

The New York Times Magazine picked up research by Bart Los, Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries: "Last year, economists at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, said that by their very rough estimates total foreign demand for Chinese goods may...

GGDC researchers played several important roles at the recent General Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW), in Dresden. This biennial conference brings together academic researchers and official...

The GGDC Summer School 2016 took place between July 11 and 15 and featured several lectures by Branko Milanović, on inequality and the role of globalisation, as well as lectures by other renowned scholars. Around 25 students from all over the world...

Marcel Timmer and Robert Inklaar presented their research at the 2016 conference of the Society for Economic Measurement. Marcel Timmer presented a framework for measuring productivity when production is fragmented across borders and prices are imperfectly...

Bart Los and Erik Dietzenbacher are teaching a module on Structural Decomposition Analysis as part of the International School of Input-Output Analysis on Monday July 4, ahead of the International Input-Output Conference in Seoul, Korea.

The Guardian has written about the report by Bart Los and others on regional support for Brexit and dependence on the EU.

Ahead of Britain's referendum on EU membership, Bart Los has co-authored a study with Philip McCann, John Springford, and Mark Thissen. 

Can we still classify an entire industry as technology intensive? At a workshop of the US National Science Foundation, Bart Los argued that this is an outdated perspective in a time when electronics manufacturing in one country may involve the development...

Gaaitzen de Vries, Abdul Azeez Erumban and Marcel Timmer presented at the fourth World KLEMS conference in Madrid on May 23 and 24 on issues of productivity and global value chains

Marcel Timmer discusses in an interview in Het Financieel Dagblad (in Dutch) how improved data collection and analysis leads to greater insights in the export performance of countries. Important insights relate to the interconnectedness of manufacturing...

A recent study, by CEPR and LSE, shows that if Britain leaves the European Union, the costs in terms of lower living standards would be substantial. The economic model that was used relies on the data of the World Input-Output Database.

Global trade has grown faster than global GDP for decades, but this pattern has recently reversed. Accounting for this slowdown is the aim of new research by that is presented today at a conference on "Productivity and External Balancing", jointly...

Today's Financieel Dagblad (Dutch only) writes about the recent report on Dutch competitiveness by Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries. The article and report discuss how services industries in the Netherlands add a growing share of the value of exports...

On Wednesday January 20, VNO-NCW and MKB-Nederland have organized 'De dag van de Industrie 2016' (the day of industry 2016) at the Nieuwspoort in the Hague. During that day, Gaaitzen de Vries will present the main outcomes from a report he and Marcel...

We were very happy that a committee of esteemed colleagues recognized the usefulness of our research and database development efforts in the national Research Review of the faculty's research school, SOM. This helped contribute to the faculty's research...

This summer, from July 11-15, the GGDC organizes a Summer School on the topic of Globalization and Inequality. Lecturers include Branko Milanović, Remco Oostendorp and Leandro Prados de la Escosura. The Summer School is intended for PhD students, research...

Gaaitzen de Vries will present today at the Asian Develoment Bank's 'Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2016 Conference' on the topic of global value chains and job dynamics. This three-day conference has a number of other notable speakers, such as...

In an article for the Dutch magazine Economisch Statistische berichten, Marcel Timmer outlines future research on global value chains. In some first results, he shows that international outsourcing has considerably smaller effects on employment than...

Herman de Jong and Marcel Timmer contributed to the KVS Preadviezen “De match tussen mens en machine” [The match between man and machine], edited by Bas ter Weel. They presented their contributions at the Behandeling van de KVS Preadviezen in The Hague.

Gaaitzen de Vries participated in an expert meeting on the Dutch economy in Global Value Chains organized by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the recent report by De Vries and Timmer on the mutual dependence of manufacturing and services for...

Gauging the strength of the Netherlands of a trading nation and analysing where it specialises should use data on trade in value added, rather than the traditional gross trade statistics. Well-known to experts, but Marcel Timmer's research in the...

Gaaitzen de Vries and Marcel Timmer finished a report for the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairsand VNO/NCW titled: “Dutch Manufacturing Competing in Global Value Chains”. The report stresses the mutual dependence of manufacturing and services for the...

Gaaitzen de Vries completed a consultancy report on ‘Global Value Chain Specialization Patterns of Sweden and Its Key Competitors’ for Tillväxtanalys (Stockholm, Sweden). The analysis shows that Austria and the Netherlands are emerging as key competitors...

El Pais reports on the changing structure of world trade using data from the World Input-Output Database (in Spanish).

Gaaitzen de Vries published new research with Benno Ferrarini of the Asian Development Bank where they account for the growth of carbon dioxide emissions due to changes in consumption, technology and global supply chain trade, see here. While emerging...

Gaaitzen de Vries participated in an expert seminar organised by the European Commission's DG EMPL and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) on structural change.

The paper "Tracing Value-Added and Double Counting in Gross Exports: Comment" (login required), written by Bart Los, Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries will appear in the American Economic Review. They provide a much simpler and more intuitive method for...

The VICI project "Modelling Global Value Chains, a new framework to study trade, jobs and income inequality in an interdependent world" has started. This 5-year project involving a team of PhD students and post docs is led by Marcel Timmer and funded by...