Incomes and Jobs in Global Production of Manufactures

摘要: It is frequently argued that globalization has entered a second phase. In the early twentieth century, rapidly falling transport costs ended the need for colocation of production and consumption. Competitiveness of countries in the first phase was determined by domestic clusters of firms, mainly competing sector to sector. More recently, fostered by rapidly falling communication and coordination costs, the production process itself was unbundled, as the various stages of production need not be performed near each other anymore. In this new phase, international competition increasingly plays itself out at the level of tasks within firms, rather than at the level of products. And trade in goods is increasingly replaced by trade in tasks (Baldwin 2006). This creates new challenges for the way in which the competitiveness of nations is analyzed.Traditional measures indicate that China and other emerging countries have rapidly …