by Jean Imbs and Laurent Pauwels
Exposure to foreign shocks is often thought to be highly dependent on foreign trade and measures of openness usually build exclusively on measures of direct trade. This column argues that in a world of global value chains, focusing on direct trade gives a distorted view of the exposure to foreign shocks. It proposes a new measure of openness which computes the fraction of gross output sold to downstream customers located abroad. This measure finds most sectors to be more open and this increased openness is estimated to cause rises in productivity and contagion, without observable effects on growth.