Bo Meng

Institute of Developing Economies - Japan External Trade Organization · Inter-disciplinary Studies Center

The exposure to extreme heat at workplaces may result in great risks to the involved labour. This issue becomes more prominent due to the global dispersion of labour-intensive work via trade. Here we combine a high-resolution climate model with an input–output model to investigate the exposure to extreme heat at work due to global trade. We find an...

Purpose In international business (IB), the discussion of COVID-19-related global value chain (GVC) models driving resilience has taken momentum since May 2020. The purpose of this study is to uncover insights that the pandemic provided as a unique research opportunity, holistically, revealing the significant role of non-lead firms in GVC outcomes...

This paper explains how we use inter-country input-output models and databases to develop new indicators for visualizing global value chains (GVCs). We created three GVC visualization tools: smile curves, networks and value-chain based revealed comparative advantage (RCA). These tools rely on new indicators of trade in value-added (TiVA), value-cha...

With rapid urbanization and industrial shifting in China, demographic and industrial relocation leads to cross-regional carbon emission spillovers, which are playing an increasingly important role in regional carbon transfer and growth. However, how urbanization and industrial shifting influence carbon spillover still needs to be clarified. In this...

This chapter presents a unified accounting framework for tracing CO2 emissions along GVCs at country, sector, and bilateral levels, which can be used to better understand the emission responsibilities of GVC participants in various roles, such as producers, consumers, exporters, importers, investors, and investees. We then demonstrate how this fram...

Facing the fluctuations of the price dynamic of carbon asset, enterprises with schedule of purchasing seek proper timing of establishing their long position of carbon emission right. However, it is not simply a timing optimization of buying financial asset, carbon asset management is always in line with the prediction of its consumption, inventory...

Input-Output (IO) data describing supply-demand relationships between buyers and sellers for goods and services within an economy have been used not only in economics but also in scientific, environmental, and interdisciplinary research. However, most conventional IO data are highly aggregated, resulting in challenges for researchers and practition...

The production technologies and carbon intensity of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is significantly different from those of domestic enterprises (DEs). However, there are few studies have paid attention to the enterprise ownerships in tracing the carbon emissions embodied in export (CEEE). By expanding the research of Wang et al. (2013) , it cons...

This paper aims to advance research on transnational corporations (TNCs) and international business policy by identifying the role and influence of foreign-owned TNCs in global value chains (GVCs) compared with those of domestically owned firms. We do this by dividing the topology of trade in value added (TiVA) into three networks composed, respect...

Carbon emissions associated with international trade are significant. The emergence of complex global value chains (GVCs) in recent decades, in which a country can operate as both a consumer and producer simultaneously, has led to a further rise in emissions. The complexity of these GVCs makes it increasingly difficult to determine what country is...

US multinational enterprises sell considerable amounts of products to China's domestic consumers that are “made” in either China or other countries. However, these sales are not counted as US exports to China. To account for this, we propose a beyond-borders approach to measuring trade flows that explicitly considers firm ownership, termed “trade i...

This study investigates the US-China relations and examines the impact of the US-China trade war on the global economy through the lens of global value chains (GVCs). We begin by reviewing the history of US-China relations in GVCs from three perspectives: cooperation, competition, and conflict. Using trade in value-added as a metric, we show that t...

We develop a visualization method based on the smile curve concept to provide reader-friendly presentations of global value chains (GVCs) analyses. Our method combines “trade in value-added” and “value-added propagation length” measures, thus helping in the identification of value-added gains, positions, and interdependencies of all GVC participant...

Full version freely available at https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/08_gvc_ch5_dev_report_2021_e.pdf

The case study in this chapter begins by demonstrating that substantial exports by US factoryless manufacturers are “missing” from the official trade statistics. The four US factoryless companies (Apple, Nike, AMD, Qualcomm) used in the case study actually exported $27.9 billion in services of intangibles assets to the PRC via their sophisticated G...

This chapter provided a broad view of recent developments in GVCs by combining indicators from the literature with ones developed by the authors of this chapter. Although economic nationalism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other headwinds reinforce the narrative of slowbalization, a comprehensive and systematic look shows that the picture is more mixe...

This paper uses the “smile curve” mapping tool with a Y-axis for value-added ratio and an X-axis for production stages to identify value-added gains, positions, and interdependencies of foreign- and domestic-owned firms in global value chains (GVCs). Taking the U.S. and China's ICT firms’ exporting activities as a target, we find that China-based d...

Population aging is an important concern not only in China but also to many developed countries, and it will be a more serious issue throughout the world in the future. From this point, understanding the impact of population aging on CO2 emissions is important for achieving carbon neutral in the future. To analyze this impact, this study quantifies...

The industrial air pollution in China and mitigation efforts used to combat it may be related to the career incentives of political elites under informal institutions. This study investigates whether and to what extent the personal connections of political elites, that is, patron-client relations between local and upper-level officials, influence C...

This paper aims to advance International Business (IB) research by better identifying the role and influential area of foreign-owned multinational enterprises (MNEs) in global value chains (GVCs) compared to that of domestic-owned firms. For doing this, we build an input-output model to divide the topology of trade in value added into three network...

Numerous the US multinational enterprises sold considerable amounts of products, which were "made" in China or third countries, to China's domestic consumers, but these sales were not counted as the US exports to China. We propose a beyond-border-type measure, "trade in factor income," that defines the US-owned factor-income induced by China's fina...

In International Business (IB), the discussion of COVID-19 related GVC models driving resilience has taken momentum since May 2020. This study opts for an integrative review to help create new knowledge through the conceptualisation of exogenous shock context with its succession to disruptive responses, leading to GVC impacts through country-and MN...

Is corruption in China detrimental or beneficial to firm productivity and by what channels? Opinions concerning this issue differ and analyses rarely consider import liberalization and firm heterogeneity. Using China’s firm-level census data and the corruption measures based on provincial filed corruption cases across 1998‒2007, we examine the impa...

As the world's largest carbon emitter, China has set stringent mitigation targets. The Five-Year-Plans have been an important administrative tool for China in climate change mitigation. However, the emissions transfer inside China has raised the problem of pollution haven affect and challenges to the effectiveness of the mitigation policies. This s...

This paper uses the "smile curve" mapping tool with a Y-axis for value-added ratio and an X-axis for production stages to identify value-added gains, positions, and interdependencies of multinationals and domestic firms along global value chains (GVCs). Taking the U.S. and China's ICT firms' exporting activities as a target, we find that China's do...

Several methods have been proposed to quantify the individual attribution to the changes in aggregate intensity, but rarely identified that one's attribution to either the intensity "A/B" form or "B/A" form that both represent one kind of efficiency indexes (cost/benefit or benefit/cost) should be equal, which is defined as the reciprocal attributi...

Are global value chains (GVCs) truly global or are they more of a regional phenomenon? We provide a new perspective on this issue using network analysis based on the measure of trade in value added. We first show that GVC activities can be consistently identified and grouped into three types of networks, i.e. traditional, simple, and complex trade...

Firms in China within the same industry but with different ownership and size have different production functions and face different emission regulations and financial conditions, thus can give very different responses to environmental policies. This fact has been largely ignored in most of the low-carbon development related literature. Using an au...

The logic of the ‘smile curve’ in the context of global value chains (GVCs) has been widely used in case studies of individual firms, but rarely identified at the country‐industry level by using real data. This paper puts forward a proposal, based on an inter‐country input–output model, to consistently measure both the gain of value added and the p...

Over the past few decades, the Chinese government has adopted a series of national innovation development strategies, which have begotten the rapid growth of Chinese patenting. However, the views expressed by the international community regarding this patent boom are split right down the middle, with some seeing it as an innovation miracle and othe...

The complexity of shared emissions responsibility for carbon transfers in various regions of China has further raised additional challenges for energy savings and carbon mitigation efforts. This paper establishes an extended provincial input-output (IO) model for each province to calculate carbon emissions based on production, consumption, and tran...

In spatial computable general equilibrium models, interregional trade ought to play an important role in determining the spatial price equilibrium. Although the Armington assumption is commonly employed to describe cross‐hauling, many of the existing models do not explicitly consider the behavior of transport firms. This paper presents a framework...

Taking advantage of a new accounting method to decompose GDP production into pure domestic production, traditional trade, simple and complex GVC activities, this chapter examines recent trends in global value chain (GVC) activities across the world. Our main findings show that the pace of GVC activities picked up in 2017 after a period of slow down...

Understanding whether and how corruption impacts firm productivity in China is crucial for promoting good governance of economic development. Based on our econometric model developed with China’s firm-level data, including detailed firm heterogeneity information and provincial records of government official-related corruption, we confirm that corru...

For the updated version of this paper, see https://doi.org/10.1080/09535314.2020.1783643

Are global value chains (GVCs) truly global or are they more of a regional phenomenon? Opinions concerning this issue are widely divergent in the literature. This paper provides new perspectives on GVCs using network analysis based on the concept of trade in value-added. By using a multiregional input-output model, we first show that GVC activities...

To date, the burden of CO2 emissions reductions has been largely confined to large enterprises in China. Using new data with firm ownership and size information included, we show that micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) produced 53% of China's CO2 emissions in 2010. Detailed supply-chain analysis reveals that final demand for products...

This paper integrates two lines of research into a unified conceptual framework: trade in value-added and embodied emissions in trade. This allows both value-added and emissions to be systematically traced at the country, sector, and bilateral levels through various routes in global value chains. By combining value-added and emissions accounting in...

The Handbook on Supply, Use and Input-Output Tables with Extensions and Applications is an update of the Handbook of National Accounting: Handbook of Input-Output Table Compilation and Analysis (United Nations, 1999) (available here https://unstats.un.org/unsd/publication/SeriesF/SeriesF_74E.pdf) to incorporate the changes in the international stan...

This paper identifies the determinants of China's bilateral trade balance using a new measure based on international input-output data, the so-called 'trade in value-added' (TiVA), which can prevent double counting in the estimation of bilateral trade balance. Our results show that using a measure based on gross exports, rather than TiVA, causes re...

Studies on the rise of global value chains (GVCs) have attracted a great deal of interest in the recent economics literature. However, due to statistical and methodological challenges, most existing researches ignore domestic regional heterogeneity in assessing the impact of joining GVCs. GVCs are supported not only directly by domestic regions tha...

The report provides an overview of the importance of the GVC phenomenon, drawing on the latest research and statistics to reveal the changing nature of international trade. It analyzes the factors that determine how deeply a country participates in GVCs and how countries can maximize the benefits that GVCs bring. The report is co-published by the...

Population and economic growth pose unique challenges in securing sufficient water, energy, and food to meet demand at the sub-national (regional), national, and supra-national level. An increasing share of this demand is met through trade and imports. The unprecedented rapid growth, extent, and complexity of global value chains (GVCs) since the 19...

This study proposes an alternative input–output based spatial structural decomposition analysis to elucidate the importance of domestic regional heterogeneity and inter-regional spillover effects in determining China's regional CO2 emissions growth. Our empirical results, based on the 2007 and 2010 Chinese inter-regional input–output tables, show t...

The rise of global value chains (GVCs) characterized by the so-called “outsourcing”, “fragmentation production”, and “trade in tasks” has been considered one of the most important phenomena for the 21st century trade. GVCs also can play a decisive role in trade policy making. However, due to the increasing complexity and sophistication of internati...

Appendix. (DOC)

This paper uses an optimal interregional input-output model to focus on how interregional industrial shifts alone might enable China to reduce carbon intensity instead of national shifts. The optimal industry shifts assure integration of all regions by regional products and goods in which carbon emissions are embodied via energy consumption. Genera...

Evaluating the role and performance of China's participation in Global value chains (GVCs) has been a hot policy and research issue in recent years. However, most GVCs-related literature about China focuses on country-to-country relations; less attention has been paid to China's domestic value chains (DVCs). GVCs should have their domestic foundati...

Recent trade literature highlights production sharing among economies [Johnson, R and G Noguera (2012). Accounting for intermediates: Production sharing and trade in value added. Journal of International Economics, 86(2), 224–236), and some studies report that 20–25% of CO2 emissions can be attributed to international trade [Peters, G, J Minx, C We...

Carbon tax and energy tax are among the hot discussions in China. This study conducts simulation studies on them with a CGE model and analyzes their economic impacts, especially on the energy-intensive sectors. The Chinese economy is affected at an acceptable level by the two taxes in different scenarios. The import and export of energy-intensive i...

This paper has been updated two times, a new version can be found here https://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12364 Bo Meng, Ming Ye, Shang-Jin Wei (2020). Measuring Smile Curves in global value chains. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.strueco.2021.10.007 Bo Meng and Ming Ye (2021). Smile Curves in Global Value Chains:...

This paper integrates two lines of research: trade in global value chains and embodied emissions into a unified conceptual framework. This allows both value-added and emissions to be systematically traced at the country, sector, and bilateral levels through various production network routes. By combining value-added and emissions accounting in a co...

In this study, we apply the inter-regional input–output model to explain the relationship between China’s inter-regional spillover of CO2 emissions and domestic supply chains for 2002 and 2007. Based on this model, we propose alternative indicators such as the trade in CO2 emissions, CO2 emissions in trade and the regional trade balances of CO2 emi...

International input–output (IO) tables are among the most useful tools for economic analysis. Since these tables provide detailed information about international production networks, they have recently attracted considerable attention in research on spatial economics, global value chains, and issues relating to trade in value added. The Institute o...

China promises to decrease carbon intensity by 2020 to 40%–45% of the level in 2005. This research proposes industry structural adjustments for industrial sectors from the perspective of reducing carbon emission. To achieve this goal, first, Energy-Carbon-Economy Input-Output (ECEIO) table is designed; second, an optimal input-output model is estab...

The paper aims to develop a quasi-dynamic interregional input-output model for evaluating the macro-economic impacts of small city development. The features of the model are summarized as follows: (1) the consumption expenditure of households is regarded as an endogenous variable, (2) the technological change is determined by the change of industri...

The Asia-Pacific Region has enjoyed remarkable economic growth in the last three decades. This rapid economic growth can be partially attributed to the global spread of production networks, which has brought about major changes in spatial interdependence among economies within the region. By applying an Input-Output based spatial decomposition tech...

Structural decomposition techniques based on input-output table have become a widely used tool for analyzing long term economic growth. However, due to limitations of data, such techniques have never been applied to China's regional economies. Fortunately, in 2003, China's Interregional Input-Output Table for 1987 and Multi-regional Input-Output Ta...

With regression formulas replaced by equilibrium conditions, a spatial CGE (Computable General Equilibrium) model can substantially reduce data requirements. Detailed regional analyses are thus possible in countries where only limited regional statistics are available. Alhough regional price differentials play important roles in multiregional setti...

With regression formulas replaced by equilibrium conditions, a spatial CGE (Computable General Equilibrium) model can substantially reduce data requirements. Detailed regional analyses are thus possible in countries where only limited regional statistics are available. Alhough regional price differentials play important roles in multiregional setti...

Over the past 20 years Asian countries have achieved a certain degree of economic growth and at the same time deepened spatial interdependence. In January 2006, IDE completed the 2000 Asian International Input-Output Table, which covers eight major East Asian countries/regions as well as Japan and the United States. Given the dynamic changes in the...

The gravity model, entropy model, potential type model and others like these have been adopted to formulate interregional trade coefficients under the framework of Multi-Regional I-O (MRIO) analysis. Since most of these models are based upon analogies in physics or on statistical principles, they do not provide a theoretical explanation from the vi...

This paper analyses the contribution to and engagement in global supply chains of Asian emerging economies by measuring several globalisation indicators based on the harmonised input-output and bilateral trade databases developed by the OECD. It focuses on major structural changes in the Asian trade network from the perspective of integration and f...

The Asian trade network is increasingly fragmented, resulting in higher dependence on supplies of goods and services from neighbouring countries. The update OECD Input-Output and Bilateral Trade Databases allow us to examine the recent evolution of international trade networks involving ASEAN and East Asian countries at the 2-digit industry level....

Firms that are expanding their cross-border activities, such as vertical specialization trade, outsourcing, and fragmentation productions, have brought dramatic changes to the global economy during the last two decades. In an attempt to understand the evolution of the interaction among countries or country groups, many trade-statistics-based indica...

This paper briefly introduces the estimation methodologies applied at IDE-Jetro and OECD to develop international input-output databases. In particular, we review the availability of underlying source data, summarize the assumptions made, and describe the harmonization techniques used. We conclude with a wish list aimed at national statistics provi...

The Armington Assumption in the context of multi-regional CGE models is commonly interpreted as follows: Same commodities with different origins are imperfect substitutes for each other. In this paper, a static spatial CGE model that is compatible with this assumption and explicitly considers the transport sector and regional price differentials is...

“Import content of exports”, based on Leontief’s demand-driven input-output model, has been widely used as an indicator to measure a country’s degree of participation in vertical specialisation trade. At a sectoral level, this indicator represents the share of inter-mediates imported by all sectors embodied in a given sector’s exported output. Howe...