Person:
Winkler, Deborah

Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice
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Fields of Specialization
International economics, Global value chains, Export competitiveness, Foreign direct investment, Offshoring, Trade
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Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice
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Last updated: March 27, 2024
Biography
Deborah Winkler is a Senior Economist in the World Bank Group’s Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice. Deborah has worked on issues of global value chains, offshoring, export competitiveness, foreign direct investment, and trade in services; their determinants; and their economic and social effects. She is particularly interested in the role that policy can play in shaping the trade-development nexus and has offered her policy analysis and advice to a variety of client countries spanning all world regions. Ms. Winkler is the author and editor of several flagship publications at the World Bank, including Making Global Value Chains Work for Development (with Daria Taglioni) and Making Foreign Direct Investment Work for Sub-Saharan Africa (with Thomas Farole). Recently, Deborah was a lead author of the Women and Trade Report: The Role of Trade in Promoting Gender Equality and a core team member of the World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains. She is a former Research Associate of the New School for Social Research and received her PhD in economics from the University of Hohenheim in Germany where she authored Outsourcing Economics (with William Milberg, CUP) and Services Offshoring and Its Impact on the Labor Market (Springer). Her articles have appeared in several journals and edited volumes.

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Publication
    SACU in Global Value Chains: Measuring GVC Integration, Position, and Performance of Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-01) Engel, Jakob; Winkler, Deborah; Farole, Thomas
    Once concentrated among a few large economies, global flows of goods, services, and capital now reach an ever larger number of economies worldwide. Global trade in goods and services increased 10 times between 1980 and 2011, while FDI flows increased almost 30-fold. The sales from foreign-owned firms amount to $26 trillion. As many as 3,000 bilateral investment treaties have been signed to create the framework of deep agreements needed not only to facilitate the global movement of final goods and services but also to internationalize entire processes of production. All these flows have grown over time, creating increasingly dense and complex networks. This note is intended provide an overview of SACU countries’ participation and performance in GVCs, drawing on several data sources and indicators, and most importantly the recently released 189-country Eora multi-region-input-output (MRIO) database (Lenzen et al. 2012, 2013). Following this introduction, the note is structured in five additional sections. Section two discusses in greater detail the scope of the report, including the data sources and methodological approaches, as well as their respective limitations. Section three looks at structural integration in trade, including the degree to which SACU countries import and export intermediates. Section four analyzes trends in value-added exports as a first step in exploring GVC participation. Section five hones in on the core measures of GVC participation and a brief analysis of SACU countries’ position in GVCs. Finally, section six concludes by bringing together the main findings from the analysis.
  • Publication
    Potential and Actual FDI Spillovers in Global Value Chains : The Role of Foreign Investor Characteristics, Absorptive Capacity and Transmission Channels
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-04) Winkler, Deborah
    Using newly collected survey data on direct supplier-multinational linkages in Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Vietnam, this paper first evaluates whether foreign investors differ from domestic producers in terms of their potential to generate positive spillovers for local suppliers. It finds that foreign firms outperform domestic producers on several indicators, but have fewer linkages with the local economy and offer less supplier assistance, resulting in offsetting effects on the spillover potential. The paper also studies the relationship between foreign investor characteristics and linkages with the local economy as well as assistance extended to local suppliers. It finds that foreign investor characteristics matter for both. The paper also examines the role of suppliers' absorptive capacities in determining the intensity of their linkages with multinationals. The results indicate that several supplier characteristics matter, but these effects also depend on the length of the supplier relationship. Finally, the paper assesses whether assistance or requirements from a multinational influence spillovers on suppliers. The results confirm the existence of positive effects of assistance (including technical audits, joint product development, and technology licensing) on foreign direct investment spillovers, while the analysis finds no evidence of demand effects.
  • Publication
    Making Foreign Direct Investment Work for Sub-Saharan Africa : Local Spillovers and Competitiveness in Global Value Chains
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2014) Farole, Thomas; Winkler, Deborah; Farole, Thomas; Winkler, Deborah
    Foreign direct investment (FDI) is becoming increasingly critical to the economies of developing countries, in part due to a major expansion in the scope of global value chains (GVCs), whereby lead firms outsource parts of their production and services activities across complex international networks. While FDI delivers a number of important contributions in terms of investment, employment, and foreign exchange, it is its spillover potential – the productivity gain resulting from the diffusion of knowledge and technology from foreign investors to local firms and workers – that is perhaps the most valuable contribution to long run growth and development. While substantial research has been undertaken on the existence and direction of spillovers from FDI, many questions remain. Moreover, there is a need to understand better the dynamics of spillovers in certain contexts, including: i) in low income countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa; ii) outside of manufacturing sectors (especially resource-based sectors); and, iii) in the context of GVCs. This book presents the results of a groundbreaking designed to address these issues drawing on detailed field research in eight countries (including five in Sub-Saharan Africa) over three sectors: agribusiness, apparel, and mining. The book presents a summary of the results of this analytical work and discusses their implications for policymakers hoping to harness the power of FDI for greater development outcomes.
  • Publication
    Global Value Chain Integration and Productivity: Evidence from Enterprise Surveys in Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-02-26) Winkler, Deborah; Farole, Thomas
    In order to adequately measure a firm’s participation in GVCs in this context, it is important to first identify the different forms through which GVC integration can affect domestic firms’ productivity. Integrating a country’s domestic suppliers into GVCs increases the possibility for productivity gains through exporting to a buyer abroad or supplying to a multinational in the country. But countries should not neglect the opportunities for productivity gains that GVC participation can provide from a buyer’s perspective. Instead of building a complete array of supply chains at home, firms can join existing supply chains of multinationals through cross-border trade in intermediates and components (Taglioni and Winkler 2015). While Farole and Winkler (2014) focus on the productivity spillovers from multinationals in a country, this note looks at the impact of cross-border sales to international buyers (exporting) or purchases of inputs from international sellers (importing) in GVCs. This note is structured as follows. Section two reviews the relevant literature with regard to productivity effects from GVC participation as well as the role of domestic firm characteristics in this context. Section three introduces the data and econometric model. In section four the author presents our regression results, while section five concludes.