A contribution to Evaluate the Impact of Global Value Chains

The critical changes caused by globalization in the way firms operate, trade and interact have led to a new international playing field in the 21st century, which, unfortunately, is still looked at with statistics of international trade that are inadequate or insufficient to understand that new reality. We contribute to this new field of research by (i) presenting a comprehensive stocktaking of measures proposed in the literature to quantify the impact of international fragmentation of production in international trade; (ii) making use of the most recent data published by the World Input-Output Database to assess in detail: (a) how internationally fragmented are OECD economies, with particular attention to Portugal; (b) the main GVC in the world and the way they operate; and (c) the net appropriation by countries of gains in income and ¿traded jobs¿ obtained due to their integration in GVC, pointing out to main winners and losers; (iii) suggesting new indicators to measure the participation and net gains of countries by being a part of GVC; and (iv) using some of those indicators in a pooled-regression model to estimate determinants of FDI stocks in OECD countries.