Quantifying International Production Sharing at the Bilateral and Sector Levels

This paper generalizes the gross exports accounting framework, initially proposed by Koopman, Wang, and Wei (2014) for a country’s aggregate exports, to one at the sector, bilateral, and bilateral-sector levels. Such a generalization requires a conceptual distinction between value added exports by forward and backward industrial linkages, and a non-trivial way to allocate bilateral intermediate trade flows into their final destinations of absorption. We present the disaggregated decomposition results among 40 trading nations in 35 sectors from 1995 to 2011 based on the World Input-Output Database and show how they help us to better understand the patterns of cross-country production sharing.