I’m very excited, as perhaps only an economist could be, by a new (and free) VoxEU e-book, The Age of Global Value Chains: Maps and Policy Issues. As the first sentence in the foreword states: “The study of global value chains is the only way to fully understand the nature of today’s geographically dispersed production and trade.” This understanding is being extended by new sources and uses of data, the World Input-Output Database in particular – the e-book has an appendix describing this.

The book divides into a descriptive first part (including a look at network structures) and a second part looking at the impacts of the increased specialisation in production across national borders. These impacts in turn are divided between the macro level (including productivity, wages and jobs) and the effects at the level of firm organisation. If I have one complaint (without having read the book yet) it is that there is no essay looking at global value chains from the perspective of urban economics, and the sub-national clustering of specialised supply chains.

Still, it’s a mild complaint about a book to say there should be more of it. I’ll be reading this one eagerly, all the more so as there are troubling signs that world trade growth is slowing. And, as I argued in my post on the FT’s The Exchange, that could be related to the global productivity puzzle.