Trade in Value Added and the Reconsideration of International Trade Models

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• 研討會日期 : 2019-11-19
• 時間 : 14:30
• 主講人 : Professor Hubert Escaith
• 主持人 : Professor Ching-Cheng Chang
• 地點 : Conference Room B110
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Escaith holds a Doctorate in Mathematics Applied to Economics from Toulouse University. He is currently a visiting Professor at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics (France) and Bournemouth University (UK). His research fields are Development economics, International economics and economic geography.
• 演講摘要 : Global value chains (GVCs) break up the production process so that different steps can be carried out in different countries. GVCs provided new opportunities for developing countries to diversify their exports. Without GVCs, a developing country would have to be able to produce a complete product line in order to substitute imports or expand into new exports. Through outsourcing and offshoring, what is traded in a GVC are not goods but a series of “tasks” embodied into intermediate products and contributing to the final product. This has great implications for development and industrialisation policies, thanks to the opportunities it gives to developing countries for integrating into specific parts of the value chain. “Factory Asia” is probably the best example of GVC-led industrialisation; other examples are the speedy integration of Eastern Europe industries into the European Community or the development of an export-oriented industry in Costa-Rica or Mexico. In this process, economists had to revise their understanding of comparative advantages and modify the theoretical models that “explained” international trade. In the traditional Ricardo or Heckscher-Ohlin models, comparative advantages are somewhat “natural” and come from the unequal distribution of primary production factors such as land, labour and capital. In a global value chain, trade is predominantly in intermediate inputs and the role of “firms”, rather than “countries” is preponderant. A Lead-Firm creates a value-chain by outsourcing tasks to domestic and foreign suppliers. In this process, comparative advantages are conditional to the lead-firm perspective and are “created” instead of “natural”, because they may not always correspond to the factor endowment of the lead-firm country. Industries that would be inefficient in producing the final product become competitive when it comes to their contribution to the international supply chain. Because value creation is optimized at each step of the production chain, final consumers are also the beneficiaries of this new mode of international specialization. The lecture will show how trade in tasks modified our understanding of trade theory. It will also introduce some new directions of theoretical modelling and empirical research. Costs and benefits may not be harmoniously distributed: the conclusions will briefly review the implications for trade and development policies required for trade “to work for the Many”.