Calculating global value chains
The increased global organization and fragmentation of value chains constitute one of the most important and complex measurement challenges for economic, business and trade statistics. The geographic and organizational unbundling of the value chain is occurring across main goods-and-services-producing activities, as well as support services such as Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), back-office functions, and even Research and Development (R&D). The national statistical institutes are confronted with more specialization and increasingly complex business linkages in spatially dispersed value chains that can be national, regional, or worldwide in scope.
Statisticians have put a lot of effort into understanding and estimating the different components of GVCs, starting with production of goods and services, international trade in goods and services (ITGS and ITSS), global input-output tables, National Accounts/BoP, International Sourcing surveys and FATS as well as new types of statistics based on linking of existing business statistics registers at micro level.
The workshop will address the issue of measuring GVCs from a business and trade statistics perspective. The purpose is to share the experiences of both NSIs and international organizations in measuring GVCs and indicate the possible future initiatives in measuring GVCs. Such initiatives could include information about the UN GVC manual, globalization indicators and presentation of national initiatives, including MDL projects.
The workshop is hosted by experts from Statistics Denmark
Workshop programme
Global Production: what is it? And how do we detect and measure it in business and economic statistics.
Presentation by Jon Mortensen; Statistics Denmark
The rise of Global Value Chains largely driven by Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) poses challenges to official statistics. The fragmentation of MNEs production across countries and continents makes it increasingly difficult to measure their activities correctly across statistical domains. This part of the work shop will focus on global production: what is it? And how do we detect and measure it in business and economic statistics.
As large MNEs account for a significant share of most countries’ economy incorrect data reports from MNEs significantly reduces the quality of business and economic statistics – including National Accounts. As a response many National Statistical Institutes (NSIs), including in the Nordics, have established so-called Large Cases Units (LCUs) specifically aimed at improving data reporting of large MNEs - especially with a focus on detecting and measuring global production. Drawing on the experience of the Danish LCU, methods on how to detect and measure Global Production activities are presented and discussed.
Measuring Global Value Chains utilizing existing statistical registers: Experiences and Possibilities
Presentation by Peter Bøegh Nielsen and Kalle Emil Holst Hansen, Statistics Denmark
Measuring GVCs is a challenging task for statistical offices as the term is not clearly defined for statistical purposes. One way of producing statistics on GVCs is to identify different aspects of GVCs and to capture these different aspects by utilizing existing business and trade statistics, e.g. information on the international dimension of the performance, organisation and demography of the enterprises. This would be a relatively simple task if all micro data on global enterprises were combined and centralized in one database with harmonized definitons. However, direct access and data sharing of micro data at international level is not (yet) feasible due to legal, organisational and technical barriers. Instead, the so-called coordinated Micro Data Linking or distributed microdata linking/research approach has been to compile internationally comparable statistics on economic globalization by establishing harmonised datasets in the participating NSIs and running a centrally developed syntax.
The presentation will describe the methods used by the Nordic statistical institutes and selected results from these projects, including lessons learned. Finally the presentation will address future possibilities and challenges by utilising Micro Data Linking for producing internationally comparable statistics on GVCs.
Global Value Chains and International Sourcing Survey: Past, Present, Future
Presentation by Michael E. Nielsen & Alina Grecu, Statistics Denmark
For more than fifteen years, the survey on international sourcing and global value chains has been developing within the European Statistical System and beyond, and the survey is now included as a dynamic statistics under the EBS regulation. We will review the development of the survey over the past years, take stock of current state of play, and look toward the future of the survey.
Each presentation will include a discussion of national experiences and possible future initiatives. Finally, the conclusions from each presentation will be wrapped-up with the purpose of stimulating future Nordic co-operation in the field of GVCs.
ATTENDANCE REQUIREMENTS
Maximum number of attendees is 50.