Taglioni, Daria

Person:
Taglioni, Daria

Trade and International Integration, Development Research Group

Fields of Specialization

International economics, Trade

ORCID

0000-0003-4973-2053

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Trade and International Integration, Development Research Group

Last updated: April 23, 2025

Biography

Daria Taglioni is Research Manager, Trade and International Integration, Development Research Group. She joined the World Bank Group in 2011 as Senior Trade Economist in the International Trade Department of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network (PREM). Since then, she has held various positions and roles, including Team-Task Lead for the World Development Report 2020, Principal Economist in the International Finance Corporation, and World Bank’s Global Lead on Global Value Chains. Previously, she worked as Senior Economist at the European Central Bank (ECB) and as Economist at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). She has published in the American Economic Review, Journal of International Economics, and other scholarly journals. Her work has been featured in international media outlet such as the New York Times and Forbes. She authored various books on international trade. She is Italian and holds a PhD in International Economics from the Graduate Institute, Geneva.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 21

Economic Consequences of Trade and Global Value Chain Integration: A Measurement Perspective
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2025-04-04) Borin, Alessandro; Mancini, Michele; Taglioni, Daria
This paper introduces a new approach to measuring Global Value Chains (GVC), crucial for informed policy-making. It features a tripartite classification (backward, forward, and two-sided) covering trade and production data. The findings indicate that traditional trade-based GVC metrics significantly underestimate global GVC activity, especially in sectors like services and upstream manufacturing, and overstate risks in early trade liberalization stages. Additionally, conventional backward-forward classifications over-estimate backward linkages. The paper further applies these measures empirically to assess how GVC participation mediates the impact of demand shocks on domestic output, highlighting both the exposure and stabilizing potential of GVC integration. These new measures are comprehensively available on the World Bank’s WITS Platform, providing a key resource for GVC analysis.
Massive Modular Ecosystems: A Framework for Understanding Complex Industries in the Digital Age
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-23) Thun, Eric; Taglioni, Daria; Sturgeon, Timothy J.; Dallas, Mark P.
The rapid evolution of the global economy, driven by digitization and modularization, has outpaced existing theoretical tools. This paper proposes a unified analytical framework for understanding the complexity of digital industries through the lens of Massive Modular Ecosystems. To operationalize this concept, the paper develops a systematic methodology for mapping prevailing and alternative governance structures across interconnected, layered, and nested ecosystems. Synthesizing insights from the global value chain governance, modularity and standards, and business ecosystem literatures, the paper demonstrates how modular governance enables distributed innovation, while non-modular governance structures – including captive supply relationships, relational partnerships, and hierarchical control – support greater value capture and strategic control. The defining element of a Massive Modular Ecosystem is not that every relationship is purely modular, but that non-modular relationships operate in a “sea of modularity,” a context where modularity prevails. Using a case study of the mobile phone industry, the paper depicts a Massive Modular Ecosystem characterized by a dynamic mix of internalization and outsourcing, with a few dominant players in each sub-ecosystem but no dominant actor overall. The study explores the broader implications of Massive Modular Ecosystems, including their impact on market structure, technological innovation, and global-scale economic geography. Increasing geographic specialization and clustering of sub-ecosystems create strong interdependencies across countries, making aggressive policy interventions risky and potentially leading to unintended consequences. Efforts to build self-sufficient domestic industries may be impractical and costly, while attempts to decouple from Massive Modular Ecosystems can lead to exclusion from critical innovation networks and standard-setting processes. By providing an integrative analytical tool, this paper offers policymakers, business leaders, and scholars a systematic approach to navigating the complexities of modern digital industries.
Trade Effects of Industrial Policies: Are Preferential Agreements a Shield?
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-17) Barattieri, Alessandro; Mattoo, Aaditya; Taglioni, Daria
This paper explores the effects of industrial policy on trade, focusing on the role of preferential trade agreements. The analysis uses data for the period 2012–2022 on detailed product-level bilateral trade, industrial policy announcements, and rules on subsidies in different preferential trade agreements. The introduction of a new industrial policy measure in a destination market reduces export growth to that market on average by about 0.28 percent. However, exports from fellow members of preferential trade agreements are not adversely affected and may even be positively affected if the agreements have deep disciplines on subsidies. These findings suggest that preferential trade agreements have a shielding effect against the trade distorting effects of industrial policies.
Firm Networks and Global Technology Diffusion
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-13) Bastos, Paulo; Stapleton, Katherine; Taglioni, Daria; Wei, Hannah Yi
This study examines the role of multinational firms and global value chain linkages in the cross-country diffusion of emerging technologies. The analysis combines detailed information on the near-universe of online job postings in 17 countries with data on multinational networks and firm-to-firm linkages from 2014 to 2022. Online job postings are utilized to investigate how jobs related to emerging technologies spread through firm networks. The findings show that emerging technology jobs are highly concentrated within multinational firms and their supply chains. Approximately one third of all emerging technology job postings during this period come from Fortune 500 firms, their affiliates, buyers, suppliers, or innovation partners. Although the locations where these technologies originate exhibit a higher prevalence of technology job openings, this advantage diminishes over time as diffusion accelerates in wealthier and geographically closer countries and regions. The study highlights the significant role of firm-to-firm linkages in technology diffusion, with some linkages proving more influential than others. Firms that were previously buyers or innovation partners of establishments in technology-originating locations experienced faster growth in jobs related to these technologies. Moreover, relationships outside corporate boundaries play a particularly critical role, and these connections are influential beyond the factor of geographical distance.
Did the 2022 global energy crisis accelerate the diffusion of low-carbon technologies?
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-20) Bastos, Paulo; Greenspon, Jacob; Stapleton, Katherine; Taglioni, Daria
This paper develops measures of the diffusion of a comprehensive range of low-carbon technologies in 35 countries from 2019 to 2022 using text analysis of job postings and earnings calls transcripts. It documents a rapid acceleration in the diffusion of low-carbon technologies in 2022, driven by technologies related to renewable energy, vehicles, thermal performance, and electrical generation and storage. Rapid growth occurred in three quarters of the countries studied and 228 of 300 subnational regions, although was fastest in Europe. Hiring for roles related to low-carbon technologies in these 35 countries doubled between 2019 and the end of 2022, for example. It studies the role of the global energy crisis in triggering this accelerated technology diffusion, focusing on 16 mainly advanced economies. It finds that establishments in countries that had a higher pre-crisis dependence on imports of natural gas, and were thus more exposed to the price shock, differentially increased hiring for low-carbon technology related roles from March 2022 onwards. Within more exposed countries, establishments with a higher pre-crisis energy intensity also saw a differential increase in hiring relative to less energy intensive ones.
The Economic Effects of Market Integration in the Western Balkans
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-07-11) Gómez, María DelMar; Zárate, Román D.; Taglioni, Daria
In the Western Balkans, trade and transport policy reforms that reduce waiting time at the border by just three hours are equivalent to removing a value-based tariff of 2 percent. Reform gains are maximized when they are coordinated across economies and implemented jointly: cross-border coordination in the implementation of the package of national single window and other trade facilitation reforms would generate 8 percent higher gains than if each economy were to carry out the reforms autonomously. The impacts of trade reforms and improvements in road infrastructure would be further amplified if Western Balkan economies belonged to the European Union, which would result in an additional 6 percent boost to welfare. Moreover, the accession of Western Balkan economies to the European Union would have positive spillover welfare effects for countries such as Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, and negligible effects for other EU members.
Massive Modularity: Understanding Industry Organization in the Digital Age — The Case of Mobile Phone Handsets
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09) Thun, Eric; Taglioni, Daria; Sturgeon, Timothy; Dallas, Mark P.
Digitization is transforming the organization and geography of industries. Once digitized, information can be generated, collected, stored, monitored, analyzed, and processed in ways not previously possible, and when common standards are used as modular interfaces, data can be transferred and put to use with greater ease across organizations and geographic space. An important effect of digitization on industrial organization is the emergence of global-scale modular ecosystems associated with specific classes of products, applications, and technologies. The modules and sub-systems in these ecosystems can—albeit with significant engineering effort, because they are complex—be reused, connected, and layered to drive innovation and deliver products and services with immense complexity at scale. The nuances of this transformation have not been lost on the field of technology management and innovation. The primary focus of this literature has been on how to capture value in modular ecosystems, mainly by focusing on how to companies can influence or leverage industry architectures and “win” in an era of digital platforms. This paper makes three contributions to these literatures, as well as to literatures on global value chains (GVCs), industry standards, and industrial policy in the post- “Washington Consensus” era: 1) it develops a broader view of modular and platform ecosystems than has been advanced so far, highlighting the overlapping and layered nature of digital industry ecosystems; 2) it focuses on the multiplicity of standards that bind modular ecosystems together; and 3) it draws attention to the geographic and geopolitical implications of what it calls Massive Modular Ecosystems (MMEs). The case study of the mobile phone handset industry reveals three paradoxes associated with MMEs: 1) they allow for extremely complex products to be produced at scale, unlike more traditional industries; 2) they simultaneously feature high degrees of market concentration at the level of complex sub-systems and components, and market fragmentation at the level of the industry overall and at the level of complementors; and 3) they are concentrated in geographic clusters, but because MMEs integrate work carried out in many specialized clusters in many countries, the system as a whole is geographically dispersed. This leads to a fourth, policy-related paradox: MMEs generate strategic and geopolitical pressures for decoupling when placed under stress, but the same set of circumstances also creates pressures for maintaining the business relationships and institutions that have come to underpin global integration.
The US-China Trade War and Global Reallocations
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-01) Fajgelbaum, Pablo; Goldberg, Pinelopi; Kennedy, Patrick; Khandelwal, Amit; Taglioni, Daria
This paper studies global trade responses to the US-China trade war. It estimates the tariff impacts on product-level exports to the US, China, and rest of world. On average, countries decreased exports to China and increased exports to the US and rest of world. Most countries export products that complement the US and substitute China, and a subset operate along downward-sloping supplies. Heterogeneity in responses, rather than specialization, drives export variation across countries. Surprisingly, global trade increased in the products targeted by tariffs. Thus, despite ending the trend towards tariff reductions, the trade war did not halt global trade growth.
Economic Upgrading through Global Value Chain Participation: Which Policies Increase the Value Added Gains?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-03) Kummritz, Victor; Taglioni, Daria; Winkler, Deborah
The emergence of global value chains has opened up new ways to achieve development and industrialization. However, new evidence shows that not all countries have gained from participating in global value chains, and that country-specific characteristics matter for economic upgrading in global value chains. This paper uses two panel data sets of developing and industrialized countries at the sectoral level to relate global value chain participation as a buyer and seller to domestic value added. These are combined with a wide range of policy measures at the country level that can play a role in economic upgrading through global value chains, by targeting global value chain integration or the quality and conditions of input and output factors. First, the study finds that global value chain integration increases domestic value added, especially on the selling side, which holds across all income levels. Second, the results highlight the importance of policy for economic upgrading through global value chain integration. Although the study cannot claim causal evidence, all the assessed policy areas are consistently shown to mediate the effects of global value chains and magnify the gains for domestic value added. Third, a detailed analysis shows that several policy areas mediate the gains from global value chains more through integration as a seller. Finally, the study observes that many of the results are driven by high- and upper-middle-income countries.
Making Global Value Chains Work for Development
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-06-06) Taglioni, Daria; Winkler, Deborah
Economic, technological, and political shifts as well as changing business strategies have driven firms to unbundle production processes and disperse them across countries. Thanks to these changes, developing countries can now increase their participation in global value chains (GVCs) and thus become more competitive in agriculture, manufacturing and services. This is a paradigm shift from the 20th century when countries had to build the entire supply chain domestically to become competitive internationally. For policymakers, the focus is on boosting domestic value added and improving access to resources and technology while advancing development goals. However, participating in global value chains does not automatically improve living standards and social conditions in a country. This requires not only improving the quality and quantity of production factors and redressing market failures, but also engineering equitable distributions of opportunities and outcomes - including employment, wages, work conditions, economic rights, gender equality, economic security, and protecting the environment. The internationalization of production processes helps with very few of these development challenges. Following this perspective, Making Global Value Chains Work for Development offers a strategic framework, analytical tools, and policy options to address this challenge. The book conceptualizes GVCs and makes it easier for policymakers and practitioners to discuss them and their implications for development. It shows why GVCs require fresh thinking; it serves as a repository of analytical tools; and it proposes a strategic framework to guide policymakers in identifying the key objectives of GVC participation and in selecting suitable economic strategies to achieve them.