Learning about global value chains by looking beyond official trade data: Part 1 | vox - 0 views
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Gross trade accounting: A transparent method to discover global value chain-related information behind official trade data: Part 1
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With the rapid increase in intermediate trade flows, trade economists and policymakers have reached a near consensus that official trade statistics based on gross terms are deficient, often hiding the extent of global value chains. There is also widespread recognition among the official international statistics agencies that fragmentation of global production requires a new approach to measure trade, in particular the need to measure trade in value-added. This led the WTO and the OECD to launch a joint “Measuring Trade in Value-Added” initiative on 15 March 2012, which is designed to mainstream the production of trade in value-added statistics and make them a permanent part of the statistical landscape.
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All the estimation methods used in recent efforts to measure trade in value-added are rooted in Leontief (1936). His work demonstrated that the amount and type of intermediate inputs needed in the production of one unit of output can be estimated based on the input-output structures across countries and industries.
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If one is only interested in estimating the domestic value-added embedded in a country’s or sector’s gross exports, applying Leontief’s insight is sufficient. However, for many economic and policy applications, one also needs to quantify other components in gross exports and their structures. In such circumstances Leontief’s original insight is not sufficient, as it does not provide a way to decompose intermediate trade flows across countries into various value-added terms according to their final absorption,
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Our gross trade accounting framework in fact allows one to further decompose each of the four major parts of gross exports above into finer components with economic interpretations
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By the gross statistics, presented in column 1 of Table 1, the trade is highly imbalanced – Chinese exports to the US ($176.9 billion in 2011) are five times that of US exports to China ($35.1 billion in 2011). If we separate exports of final goods and of intermediate goods (reported in columns 2a and 2b of Table 1), we see that most of the Chinese exports consist of final goods, whereas most of the US exports consist of intermediate goods.
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In other words, the US exports rely overwhelmingly on its own value-added (only 2.1% from China and 5.8% from other countries in 2011), whereas the Chinese exports use more foreign value-added, especially value-added from third countries (with 3.2% from the US and 23.1% from Japan, Korea, and all other countries).
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As a consequence of these differences in the structure of value-added composition, the China–US trade balance in this sector looks much smaller when computed in terms of domestic value-added than in terms of gross exports.
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By identifying which parts of the official data are double counted and the sources of the double counting, our gross trade accounting method provides a transparent way to bridge official trade statistics (in gross terms) and national accounts (in value-added terms) consistent with the System of National Accounts standard.