Michele Mancini

Follow the Value Added: Bilateral Gross Export Accounting

The diffusion of international production networks has challenged the capability of traditional trade statistics to provide an adequate representation of supply and demand linkages among the economies. To address this issue, new statistical tools (the Inter-Country Input-Output tables) and new analytical frameworks have been developed. Koopman, Wang and Wei propose an accounting methodology to decompose a country’s total gross exports by source and final destination of their embedded value added. We develop this approach further by deriving a fully consistent counterpart for bilateral trade flows, refining the original framework. Along with other contributions, our methodology completes the bridge between traditional trade statistics and the systems of national accounts and provides new tools for investigating global value chains. Here we present two empirical applications of two different versions of our decomposition of bilateral trade flows: one explores the forward linkages of Italian exports; the second derives a measure of the share of value-chain-related trade and assesses how its evolution since the mid-1990s has affected the relationship between world trade and income.

Understanding the Weakness in Global Trade - What is the New Normal?

Global trade has been exceptionally weak over the past four years. While global trade grew at approximately twice the rate of GDP prior to the Great Recession, the ratio of global trade to GDP growth has declined to about unity since 2012. This paper assesses to what extent the change in the relationship between global trade and global economic activity is a temporary phenomenon or constitutes a lasting change. It finds that global trade growth has been primarily dampened by two factors. First, compositional factors, including geographical shifts in economic activity and changes in the composition of aggregate demand, have weighed on the sensitivity of trade to economic activity. Second, structural developments, such as waning growth in global value chains, a rise in non-tariff protectionist measures and a declining marginal impact of financial deepening, are dampening the support from factors that boosted global trade in the past. Notwithstanding the particularly pronounced weakness in 2015 that is assessed to be mostly a temporary phenomenon owing to a number of country-specific adverse shocks, the upside potential for trade over the medium term appears to be limited. The JEL Classification: F10, F13, F14, F15

Trade Weakness: Cycle or Trend?

In 2011–2016 global trade volumes systematically surprised on the downside, to a much larger extent than real GDP; in other words, the income elasticity of trade declined and was lower than expected. This finding has generally been interpreted as evidence of the importance of structural factors in determining the weakness of international trade. However, as income elasticity is itself a cyclical variable, the role of cyclical factors has been underestimated. Once the cyclicality of the elasticity is correctly accounted for, it turns out that cyclical forces have provided the main contribution to the unexpected weakness of trade. In addition, the accuracy of existing forecasts on trade growth can be significantly improved by using real-time information about business conditions, given that a large share of the forecast error depends on mispredicted income elasticities.

The cyclicality of the income elasticity of trade

In 2011-2015 global trade volumes have systematically surprised on the downside, to a much larger extent than real GDP. We show that two key features of real trade flows --- their high volatility and their procyclicality --- determine a cyclicality of the income elasticity of trade. This property is such that when real GDP growth is positive but lower than its long-run trend, then the income elasticity of trade is also smaller than its own long-run trend. As a consequence, when real GDP growth turns out to be weaker than expected, the forecast error on trade volumes is amplified by the fact that also the income elasticity of trade happens to be smaller than predicted. Our analysis shows, in particular, that long-run and cyclical forces have contributed to a similar extent to the recent weakness of trade volumes. As a by-product, we also explain how the high volatility and procyclicality of real trade flows, together with the size of the non-tradeable-goods sector, contribute to determine cross-country differences in the income elasticity of trade.