Deborah Winkler

World Bank

Deborah Winkler is a Senior Economist in the World Bank Group’s Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice. Deborah has worked on issues of global value chains, offshoring, export competitiveness, foreign direct investment, and trade in services; their determinants; and their economic and social effects. She is particularly interested in the role that policy can play in mediating these relationships. She is a former Research Associate of the New School for Social Research and received her PhD in economics from the University of Hohenheim in Germany.Most recently, Deborah was a lead author of the World Bank’s report on Women and Trade: The Role of Trade in Promoting Gender Equality (2020) and a core team member of the World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains (2019). 

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2023
Michele Mancini, Aaditya Mattoo, Daria Taglioni, Debora Winkler

Sub‐Saharan Africa’s participation in global value chains: 1995–2021

This paper examines Sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA) role in global value chains (GVCs) through a new comprehensive country-sector level database. It reaffirms known aspects: SSA's involvement in GVCs has grown but still trails other regions, especially in manufacturing. Typically, SSA is involv...

Publication / Scientific paper

Ana Margarida Fernandes, Hiau Looi Kee, and Deborah Winkler

What determines countries’ global value chain participation? Three lessons from the past that matter for the future of global value chains

In the early 1990s, Argentina tried to develop a homegrown auto industry, hiding behind an average tariff of more than 13 percent. Over the past two decades, Argentina’s auto exports have stagnated at a dismal 0.2 percent of global auto exports. Around the same period, General Motors (GM) set u...


2021
Alvaro Espitia, Aaditya Mattoo, Nadia Rocha, Michele Ruta, Deborah Winkler

Pandemic trade: COVID‐19, remote work and global value chains

This paper studies the trade effects of COVID-19 using monthly disaggregated trade data for 28 countries and multiple trading partners from the beginning of the pandemic to June 2020. Regression results based on a sector-level gravity model show that the negative trade effects induced by COVID-19 sh...

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2021
Ana Margarida Fernandes, Hiau Looi Kee, Deborah Winkler

Determinants of Global Value Chain Participation: Cross-Country Evidence

The past decades have witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains (GVCs). Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of countries’ GVC partic...

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2020
Erik Churchill, José-Antonio Monteiro, Victor Stolzenburg & Deborah Winkler

Women and Trade: The role of trade in promoting gender equality

In view of the complexity of the relationship between trade and gender, it is important to assess the potential impact of trade policy on both women and men and to develop appropriate policies to ensure that trade contributes to enhancing opportunities for all. Building on new analysis and data brok...

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2019
Victor Stolzenburg, Daria Taglioni, Deborah Winkler

Economic upgrading through global value chain participation: which policies increase the value-added gains?

The emergence of global value chains has opened up new ways to achieve development and industrialization. However, new evidence shows that not all countries have gained from participating in global value chains, and that country-specific characteristics matter for economic upgrading in global value ...

Publication / Scientific paper

2019
World Bank

World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains

Global value chains (GVCs) powered the surge of international trade after 1990 and now account for almost half of all trade. This shift enabled an unprecedented economic convergence: poor countries grew rapidly and began to catch up with richer countries. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, howe...

Publication / Report

2018
Thomas Farole, Claire Hollweg and Deborah Winkler

Trade in Global Value Chains: An Assessment of Labor Market Implications

The paper is structured in six further sections following this introduction. Section two develops a conceptual framework, and reviews the literature on the relationship between trade integration and labor market outcomes. Section three outlines the empirical framework and data used in the analysis. ...

Publication / Scientific paper

2016
Taglioni, D.; Winkler, D.

Making Global Value Chains Work for Development

Economic, technological, and political shifts as well as changing business strategies have driven firms to unbundle production processes and disperse them across countries. Thanks to these changes, developing countries can now increase their participation in global value chains (GVCs) and thus beco...

Publication / Scientific paper

2014
Thomas Farole and Deborah Winkler

Making Foreign Direct Investment Work for Sub-Saharan Africa: Local Spillovers and Competitiveness in Global Value Chains

Economic, technological, and political shifts as well as changing business strategies have driven firms to unbundle production processes and disperse them across countries. Thanks to these changes, developing countries can now increase their participation in global value chains (GVCs) and thus becom...

Publication / Report

2013
William Milberg, Deborah Winkler

Outsourcing Economics: Global Value Chains in Capitalist Development

Publication / Scientific paper

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