Sónia Cabral

Global Value Chains: A Survey of Drivers and Measures

Global value chains (GVCs) emerged as the paradigm for the international organization of production. For most goods and services production is nowadays vertically fragmented across different countries and this reality gave rise to a significant new strand of research in international trade. This article starts by discussing the major driving forces of GVCs in recent decades. Next, it surveys the main measures of GVCs, accounting for their different scopes and required data sets. The article highlights the timing of the contributions to the literature, signalling their sequential nature and the trend toward more accurate and data‐demanding indicators.

Networks of Value Added Trade

Global Value Chains (GVCs) became the paradigm for the production of most goods and services around the world. Therefore, linkages among countries can no longer be adequately assessed through standard bilateral gross trade flows and new methods of analysis are needed. In this paper, we apply visualisation tools and measures of network analysis on value-added trade flows in order to understand the nature and dynamics of GVCs. The paper uses data on the bilateral foreign value added in exports from the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) for the period 1995-2011 and, in each period, the GVC is represented as a directed network of nodes (countries) and edges (value added flows). The analysis is extended beyond total trade flows with a view to discussing the distinct roles of goods and services in GVCs. Moreover, the differences between Germany, the US, China and Russia as major suppliers of value added in GVCs are also examined.

Lost in translation? The relative wages of immigrants in the Portuguese labour market

This article examines the wage gaps between immigrant and Portuguese workers using matched employer–employee data for the 2002–2008 period. We found that most of the wage gap is not due to the worst endowments of the immigrants but to differences in the returns to those characteristics and to the immigrant status effect. In particular, immigrants’ education and foreign experience are significantly less valued in the Portuguese labour market. Overall, the wages of immigrants do not fully converge to those of comparable natives as domestic experience increases. The assimilation rates tend to be stronger in the first years after migration and for immigrants with higher levels of foreign experience. Total immigrants are a heterogeneous group of different nationalities, with immigrants from the EU15 and China starring as the two extreme cases.