post thumbnail alt text

Zhi Wang

George Mason University

Zhi Wang is a research professor of Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, as well as professor and founding director of Research Center of Global Value Chains at University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) in Beijing. His research interests are in international trade, where he has made significant contributions to the field of measuring and analysing global value chains. He holds a Ph.D in applied economics from the University of Minnesota with a minor in computer and information sciences.
More about Zhi Wang ›
publication
Domestic segment of global value chains in China under state capitalism

This paper studies the relationship between the changing domestic segment of global value chains and the return of state capitalism in China. To this end, we propose a method to estimate an extended input-output (IO) table that tracks inter-sector transactions between different types of firms in a domestic economy. The method is an application of constrained optimization, which relies on basic information from a country's national IO table, as well as sector- and firm-level data. We also propose a way to construct bootstrapped standard errors for any global value chain (GVC) measures estimated from the extended IO tables. We then use the extended IO table to study the domestic segment of GVC in China. We find that, not only is state-owned enterprises’ (SOEs) domestic value-added to gross exports ratio much higher than those of other firms, but it also increased significantly from 1.2 in 2007 to 1.7 in 2010. Our findings suggest that, even after years of privatization, SOEs still play an important role in shaping China's exports.

Read more ›
publication
Services development and comparative advantage in manufacturing

Most manufacturing activities use inputs from the financial and business services sectors. But these services sectors also compete for resources with manufacturing activities, provoking concerns about deindustrialization attributable to financial services in developed countries like the United States and United Kingdom, and business services in developing countries like India and the Philippines. This paper examines the implications of services development for the export performance of manufacturing sectors. We develop a methodology to quantify the indirect role of services in international trade in goods and construct new measures of revealed comparative advantage based on value-added exports. We show that the development of financial and business services enhances the revealed comparative advantage of manufacturing sectors that use these services intensively but not of other manufacturing sectors. We also find that a country can partially overcome the handicap of an underdeveloped domestic services sector by relying more on imported services inputs. Thus, lower services trade barriers in developing countries can help to promote their manufacturing exports.

Read more ›
publication
Global Value Chains and Effective Exchange Rates at the Country‐Sector Level

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is one of the most cited statistics in open‐economy macroeconomics. We show that the models used to compute these numbers are not rich enough to allow for the rising importance of global value chains. Moreover, because different sectors within a country participate in international production sharing at different stages, sector‐level variations are also important for determining competitiveness. Incorporating these features, we develop a framework to compute REER at both the sector and country level and apply it on intercountry input‐output tables to study the properties of the new measures.

Read more ›
publication
Tracing CO2 emissions in global value chains

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 a consistent way, the potential environmental cost along global value chains can be estimated from different perspectives like production, consumption, and trade. Using this unified accounting framework, we trace value-added and CO2 emissions in global production and trade networks among 41 economies in 35 sectors from 1995 to 2009 based on the World Input–Output Database, and show how they improve our understanding of the impacts of cross-border production sharing on the environment.

Read more ›

Stay tuned on the latest news from our research network.

Subscribe to our newsletter now