M ERCHANDISE trade is by far the best documented aspect of international economic relations. Trade data therefore offer a rich source of information on patterns and shifts in the allocation of economic activity around the globe. In this paper I describe global merchandise trade flows through the lens of intra-industry trade (IIT) indices, which quantify the extent to which bilateral imports and...

Internationalisation of production has important effects on world trade The growing “internationalisation” of production systems, which increasingly involve vertical trading chains spanning a number of countries, each specialising in a particular stage of production, is an important feature behind the changing nature and increasing scale of world trade. Although there is considerable anecdotal ...

We show that the advent of improved logistics management, including the “just-intime” (JIT) production system, can plausibly explain much of the dramatic (i.e., roughly 95%) growth of intra-firm trade in intermediates from Canadian affiliates to their U.S. MNC parents in the 1984-1995 period. The decline in tariffs and physical transport costs over this period was far too small (about 2.5%) to ...