Documents Timmer, Marcel P. 6 results

"Increasing fragmentation of production across borders is changing the nature of international competition. As a result, conventional indicators of competitiveness based on gross exports become less informative and new measures are needed. In this paper we propose a new concept based on the value added that countries contribute to the production of final manufacturing goods, called ‘global value chain (GVC) income'. We develop an ex-post accounting framework to measure this and provide trends for European countries based on a recent multi-sector input–output model of the world economy. We find that gross exports overestimate the competitiveness of economies that rely heavily on imported intermediates, and this bias has increased over time. Based on GVC incomes, we find that revealed comparative advantage of the EU27 is shifting to activities related to the production of non-electrical machinery and transport equipment, and away from non-durables. We also find that the number of jobs involved (GVC jobs) is declining and increasingly carried out by high-skilled workers outside the manufacturing sector, highlighting the uneven distributional consequences of production fragmentation. The results show that a GVC perspective on competitiveness is needed to better inform the policy debates on globalization."

"How was life in 1820, and how has it improved since then? What are the long-term trends in global well-being? Views on social progress since the Industrial Revolution are largely based on historical national accounting in the tradition of Kuznets and Maddison. But trends in real GDP per capita may not fully re­flect changes in other dimensions of well-being such as life expectancy, education, personal security or gender inequality. Looking at these indicators usually reveals a more equal world than the picture given by incomes alone, but has this always been the case? The new report How Was Life? aims to fill this gap. It presents the first systematic evidence on long-term trends in global well-being since 1820 for 25 major countries and 8 regions in the world covering more than 80% of the world's population. It not only shows the data but also discusses the underlying sources and their limitations, pays attention to country averages and inequality, and pinpoints avenues for further research.

The How Was Life? report is the product of collaboration between the OECD, the OECD Development Centre and the CLIO-INFRA project. It represents the culmination of work by a group of economic historians to systematically chart long-term changes in the dimensions of global well-being and inequality, making use of the most recent research carried out within the discipline. The historical evidence reviewed in the report is organised around 10 different dimensions of well-being that mirror those used by the OECD in its well-being report How's Life? (www.oecd.org/howslife), and draw on the best sources and expertise currently available for historical perspectives in this field. These dimensions are:per capita GDP, real wages, educational attainment, life expectancy, height, personal security, political institutions, environmental quality, income inequality and gender inequality."

"We propose a new method to analyse the changing skills structure of employment in countries based on the input-output structure of the world economy. Demand for jobs, characterized by skill type and industry of employment, is driven by changes in technology, trade and consumption. Using structural decomposition analysis, we study the relative importance of these drivers for the period 1995-2008. In doing so, we derive a new measure of technological change in vertically integrated production chains and show that it has been skill-biased. We find that skill-biased technological change has played the most important role in the different employment growth rates of high-skilled, medium-skilled and low-skilled labour in advanced countries. For emerging countries, the patterns of employment growth are very heterogeneous."

"The paper provides an analysis of the trends in labour productivity and employment growth at industry level in the European Union and the United States during the 1990's. We analyse relationships for groups of industries, i..e. industries that produce ICT products and services, those that invest strongly in ICT, and those that make less intensive use of ICT. The main findings are that the inverse relationship between employment and productivity growth has been much more prominent in manufacturing industries that in services industries. Secondly, during the 1990s, this relationship has turned positive in many industries, in particlar in ICT-producing industries and in ICT-using industries in the service sector. Finally, the employment-reducing effects of productivity growth hav remained considerably stronger in urope than in the US."

"This paper gives an overview of the construction of and preliminary results from the EU KLEMS database which contains industry estimates of output, input and productivity growth for EU countries. The paper begins with a discussion of methodology and data sources covering output and intermediates, capital and labour services. The content and scope of the database is then briefly described. This is followed by a discussion of preliminary results focusing on comparisons between the EU and US. These confirm the relatively poor productivity performance of the EU relative to the US since the mid-1990s, mostly driven by low productivity growth in market services."

"Market services productivity: Since the mid-1990s, market services have positively influenced labor productivity growth in the US, but not in most European countries. We analyze these cross-country differences in growth dynamics using industry-level measures of output, inputs, and multifactor productivity (MFP) from the new EU KLEMS database. We find that using detailed data has important implications for empirical analysis of policy influences on growth. Increased investment in information and communication technology (ICT) capital and growth in human capital contributed substantially to labor productivity growth in market services across all European countries and the US. However, countries differ most strongly in the rates of efficiency improvement in the use of inputs. We find no evidence of an externality-driven relationship between such efficiency changes and the growth of ICT use or of employment of university-educated workers. We also find that entry liberalization has been beneficial for productivity growth in telecommunications, but not in other service industries."