Supply Chain Fragmentation and the Global Trade Elasticity: A New Accounting Framework

In this paper, we offer a new framework to measure cross-border supply chain fragmentation and its impact on the global trade elasticity. Firstly, we introduce the supply chain fragmentation ratio that sums the volume of imports by all countries that participate in a particular supply chain. We find that supply chain fragmentation slowed down after 2010 for most goods, but not for services. We demonstrate the importance of using trade and production data at constant prices in measuring fragmentation trends. Secondly, we quantify the impact of fragmentation on the elasticity of trade to world GDP, extending the framework of Bems et al. (Am Econ Rev Pap Proc 101(3):308–312, 2011). We account for trade effects from fragmentation within supply chains as well as asymmetric shocks to final demand. We find that the declining pace of fragmentation accounted for more than a third of the decline in the global trade elasticity after 2010. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at (10.1057/s41308-021-00134-8).