This paper proposes an accounting framework that breaks up a country’s gross exports into various value-added components by source and additional double-counted terms. Our parsimonious framework bridges a gap between official trade statistics (in gross value terms) and national accounts (in value-added terms), and integrates all previous measures of vertical specialization and value-added trade in the literature into a unified framework. To illustrate the potential of such a method, we present a number of applications including re-computing revealed comparative advantages and the magnifying impact of multi-stage production on trade costs. (JEL E01, E16, F14, F23, L14)

This paper generalizes the gross exports accounting framework, initially proposed by Koopman, Wang, and Wei (2014) for a country's aggregate exports, to one at the sector, bilateral, and bilateral-sector levels. Such a generalization requires a conceptual distinction between value added exports by forward and backward industrial linkages, and a non-trivial way to allocate bilateral intermediate trade flows into their final destinations of absorption. We present the disaggregated decomposition results among 40 trading nations in 35 sectors from 1995 to 2011 based on the World Input-Output Database and show how they help us to better understand the patterns of cross-country production sharing.

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Recent expansion of the scale of human activities poses severe threats to Earth’s life-support systems. Increasingly, protected areas (PAs) are expected to serve dual goals: protect biodiversity and secure ecosystem services. We report a nationwide assessment for China, quantifying the provision of threatened species habitat and four key regulating services—water retention, soil retention, sandstorm prevention, and carbon sequestration—in nature reserves (the primary category of PAs in China). We find that China’s nature reserves serve moderately well for mammals and birds, but not for other major taxa, nor for these key regulating ecosystem services. China’s nature reserves encompass 15.1% of the country’s land surface. They capture 17.9% and 16.4% of the entire habitat area for threatened mammals and birds, but only 13.1% for plants, 10.0% for amphibians, and 8.5% for reptiles. Nature reserves encompass only 10.2–12.5% of the source areas for the four key regulating services. They are concentrated in western China, whereas much threatened species’ habitat and regulating service source areas occur in eastern provinces. Our analysis illuminates a strategy for greatly strengthening PAs, through creating the first comprehensive national park system of China. This would encompass both nature reserves, in which human activities are highly restricted, and a new category of PAs for ecosystem services, in which human activities not impacting key services are permitted. This could close the gap in a politically feasible way. We also propose a new category of PAs globally, for sustaining the provision of ecosystems services and achieving sustainable development goals.

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The explosive growth of Chinese trade may be due to international production fragmentation, but few have assessed these phenomena together, in part, because it is difficult to measure the vertical specialization (VS) of China's trade. Unique features of China's processing trade cause both identification of imported inputs and their allocation across sectors to vary by trade regime. This paper estimates the VS of Chinese merchandise exports, addressing these two challenges. A new method to identify Chinese imported inputs is developed, and used to calculate VS by sector and destination. VS estimates based on the official Chinese input-output table are contrasted with those based on a split table, capturing processing and normal exports separately. Last, the paper tests whether Chinese "export sophistication" can be explained by VS.* Dean (corresponding author): Brandeis University,

Using bibliometric methods, we investigate China's international scientific collaboration from 3 levels of collaborating countries, institutions and individuals. We design a database in SQL Server, and make analysis of Chinese SCI papers based on the corresponding author field. We find that China's international scientific collaboration is focused on a handful of countries. Nearly 95% international co-authored papers are collaborated with only 20 countries, among which the USA account for more than 40% of all. Results also show that Chinese lineage in the international co-authorship is obvious, which means Chinese immigrant scientists are playing an important role in China's international scientific collaboration, especially in English-speaking countries.

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