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American Economic Review Vol. 101 No. 3 2011

Vertical Linkages and the Collapse of Global Trade

Rudolfs Bems1; Robert C. Johnson2; Kei‐Mu Yi3

1 International Monetary Fund, 700 19th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20431. · 2 Department of Economics, Dartmouth College, Rockefeller Hall #6106, Hanover, NH 03755. · 3 Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 90 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55480.

Abstract

A common view is that cross-border vertical linkages played a key role in the 2008–2009 collapse of global trade. This paper presents two accounting results from a global input-output framework that shed light on this channel. We feed in observed changes in final demand and find that trade in final goods fell by twice as much as trade in intermediate goods. Nevertheless, intermediate goods account for more than two-fifths of the trade collapse. We also find that vertical specialization trade fell 13 percent, while value-added trade fell by 10 percent, because declines in demand were largest in highly vertically-specialized sectors.

DOI
10.1257/aer.101.3.308
Volume
101
Issue
3
Pages
308-312
Language
en
Sources
crossref bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex

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