Economic and environmental upgrading in an era of globalized and fragmented value chains

The production processes of goods and services in modern economies are fragmented and often conducted in multiple countries. This form of production leads to the formation of global value chains (GVCs). This thesis studies the implications of production fragmentation across regions and countries for economic and environmental upgrading. Chapter 2 identifies three quantitative measures for economic upgrading, namely process, product and skill upgrading. Chapter 3 provides country-industry level evidence that participation in GVCs is positively related to economic upgrading. GVC participation depends on a country’s specialization patterns and on its forward and backward linkages within GVCs. Chapter 4 focuses on China’s economic upgrading in the GVC framework and investigates how China can further narrow its GDP per capita gap with developed countries. Chapter 5 analyzes China’s regional upgrading in environmental performance and investigates the effects of China’s domestic inter-regional production fragmentation on its regional environment

How much does exchange rate volatility affect China's value-added in exports?

This paper aims to study how much exchange rate volatility affect China's value-added in exports from the perspective of global value chains. Econometric models are established to estimate the influence of RMB volatility on exports and imports demand. By combining these econometric models with non-competitive input-output model capturing processing trade, this paper further measure the impact of RMB volatility on China's value-added in exports. The results show that RMB volatility not only affect the direct value-added in exports, but also affect the indirect value-added in exports because it affects the substitution of imports for domestic products. Additionally, the results reveal that processing trade mitigate the influence of RMB volatility on value-added in exports. As for the sectors, sectors with higher share of processing trade are less affected. On the contrary, sectors which have higher import price elasticities tend to be more strongly affected

Upgrading or downgrading:China's regional carbon emission intensity evolution and its determinants

One of China's major national targets is to environmentally upgrade its economy. In this paper, we define environmental upgrading as lowering the carbon intensity. The disparities among China's regions suggest to examine China's carbon emission performance at the regional level. For this purpose, we use inter-regional input-output tables (for 2002, 2007, and 2012) that distinguish processing exports from ordinary exports. The regional emission intensities (EIs) show environmental downgrading in the period 2002-2007 and upgrading during 2007-2012. To identify the determinants of the evolution of regional EIs, we have employed a multiplicative structural decomposition analysis. Changes in direct emission coefficients and changes in production technology are found to be the major determinants. However, next to these standard determinants, we also evaluate the effects on the changes in regional EIs of changes in inter-regional trade and changes in inter-regional spillovers. Changing inter-regional trade is found to have increased the EI significantly in western and central regions. This suggests that more "dirty" production was shifted from coastal to inland regions. Our study yields clear policy recommendations for achieving China's transformation to a low-carbon economy. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Global value chain participation and its impact on industrial upgrading

Participation in global value chains (GVCs) has become a central topic in trade and development policy. It has opened new ways to achieve industrial upgrading. However, some theoretical models suggest that not all countries will upgrade through participation in GVCs. Using panel data from the World Input-Output Database, we examine the effects of backward and forward GVC participation on three dimensions of industrial upgrading (process, product and skill upgrading). We find that backward GVC participation provides more upgrading opportunities for developing countries as it enables a less developed country to import sophisticated inputs. This activates learning through embodied knowledge. In contrast, forward participation has higher level of upgrading effect on developed countries

The "S" Curve Relationship between Export Diversity and Economic Size of Countries

The highly detailed international trade data among all countries in the world during 1971-2000 shows that the kinds of export goods and the logarithmic GDP (gross domestic production) of a country has an S-shaped relationship. This indicates all countries can be divided into three stages accordingly. First, the poor countries always export very few kinds of products as we expect. Second, once the economic size (GDP) of a country is beyond a threshold, its export diversity may increase dramatically. However, this is not the case for rich countries because a ceiling on the export diversity is observed when their GDPs are higher than another threshold. This pattern is very stable for different years although the concrete parameters of the fitting sigmoid functions may change with time. In addition, we also discussed other relationships such as import diversity with respect to logarithmic GDP, diversity of exporters with respect to the number of export goods etc., all of these relationships show S-shaped or power law patterns. Although this paper does not explain the origin of the S-shaped curve, it may provide a basic empirical fact and insights for economic diversity.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure

Measuring industrial upgrading: applying factor analysis in a global value chain framework

A key question for promoting international competition is how to improve the position of countries and industries in global value chains (GVCs). The first step is to properly measure industrial upgrading in GVCs. This is not a trivial issue because upgrading has not been defined unambiguously. Several authors have used different (and sometimes related) measures, all of which indicate certain aspects of upgrading. Rather than trying to find the single, ultimate measure of upgrading, we propose a different approach. We examine the multidimensionality of industrial upgrading, using eight indicators in factor analysis. Four of the eight indicators adopt the GVC perspective and include, for example, the growth of the share in value-added exports. We provide three quantitative dimensions of industrial upgrading: process upgrading, product upgrading, and skill upgrading. With these dimensions, we compare and analyze the upgrading of different countries and industries using the World Input–Output Database

Modeling and application of sensory evaluation of blueberry wine based on principal component analysis

In this study, eight different levels of commercial blueberry wines were studied to establish the comprehensive quality evaluation method of blueberry wine. Eleven physicochemical indexes (total carbohydrates (TC), total acids (TA), total esters (TE), total phenols (TP), total anthocyanins (ANT), color density (CD), tint (T), alcohol by volume (ABV), total soluble solids (TSS), Ph value, total dry extracts (TDE)) were used to establish the quality evaluation model and conduct the principal component analysis (PCA). Based on the results from PCA, the first three principal components accounted for 85.73% of the total quality variability. The consistent ranking of blueberry wines between quality evaluation model and sensory evaluation test verified the reliability of this model. In addition, ultrasonic-treated blueberry wine showed a higher score than the untreated group, which reflected the sensory quality changes of blueberry wine during ultrasonic treatment with high sensitivity. This study provides a theoretical basis for the comprehensive quality evaluation of blueberry wines and reasonable instruction for consumers’ choices