Person:
Taglioni, Daria
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
International economics,
Trade
Degrees
ORCID
Departments
Trade and International Integration, Development Research Group
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
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.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 11
-
Publication
In the Wake of the Global Crisis : Evidence from a New Quarterly Database of Export Competitiveness
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-12)Over the past two decades, international trade has become a privileged engine of growth for much of the developing world. With the global economy evolving continuously and rapidly, countries must pay close attention to their positioning on the map of global trade and production. Within this framework, countries must also become aware of how they fare relative to competitors and to their past export performance. Of particular importance is the extent to which their performance is driven by exporter own supply-side capacity as opposed to external or compositional factors, including product and geographical specialization and how these trends compare across countries. This paper describes a new initiative that uses quarterly data for 2005q1-2013q1 to compute comparable indicators of export performance for 228 countries and territories. The database, the Export Competitiveness Database, reveals interesting patterns in trade performance. Export performance, stripped of compositional effects, was strongest for countries from the Asia and Pacific region, on average. Moreover, such performance was almost entirely driven by exporting country specific factors, with changes reflecting growth in volume rather than price developments. All emerging and developing regions have, on average, improved export performance. The indicators in the database trace the legacy of supply-side capacity and the overall export performance of the double-dip recession in the euro area. An illustrative set of results suggests that the paper's measure of competitiveness correlates to a country's nominal and real effective exchange rate, factors that are commonly perceived as important determinants of competitiveness. -
Publication
Innocent Bystanders : How Foreign Uncertainty Shocks Harm Exporters
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-10)The failure of trade economists to anticipate the extreme drop in trade post Lehman Brothers bankruptcy suggests that the behavior of trade in exceptional circumstances may still be poorly understood. This paper explores whether uncertainty shocks have explanatory power for movements in trade. VAR estimations on United States data suggest that domestic uncertainty is a strong predictor of movements in imports, but has little effect on exports. Guided by these results, the paper estimates a bilateral model with focus on the impact of importer uncertainty on foreign suppliers. It finds that there is a strong negative relationship between uncertainty and trade and that this relationship is non-linear. Uncertainty matters most when its levels are exceptionally high. The paper does not find evidence of learning from past turmoils, suggesting that prior experience with major uncertainty shocks does not reduce the effect on trade. In line with the expectations, the negative effect of uncertainty shocks on trade is higher for trade relationships more intensive in durable goods. Surprisingly, however, the effect of durability is non-linear. Supply chain considerations or the possibility that the relationships with the highest durability lead to important compositional effects may have a bearing on the results. The results are robust to excluding the post Lehman shock, suggesting that the trade response during the 2008-2009 crisis has been similar to past uncertainty events. -
Publication
Making Global Value Chains Work for Development
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-05)Global value chains (GVCs) are playing an increasingly important role in business strategies, which has profoundly changed international trade and development paradigms. GVCs now represent a new path for development by helping developing countries accelerate industrialization and the servicification of the economy. From a firm perspective, production in the context of GVCs highlights the importance of being able to seamlessly connect factories across borders, as well as protect assets such as intellectual property. From the policy maker perspective, the focus is on shifting and improving access to resources while also advancing development goals, and also on the question of whether entry into GVCs delivers labor-market-enhancing outcomes for workers at home, as well as social upgrading. GVCs can lead to development, but, at the country level, constraints such as the supply of various types of labor and skills and inadequate absorptive capacity remain. GVCs can create new opportunities on the labor demand side, but supply and demand cannot meet if the supply is missing. This potential gap illustrates the importance of embedding national GVC policies into a broader portfolio of policies aimed at upgrading skills, physical and regulatory infrastructure, and enhancing social cohesion. -
Publication
Making Global Value Chains Work for Development
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-06-06)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. -
Publication
Inclusive Global Value Chains: Policy Options for Small and Medium Enterprises and Low-Income Countries
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-08-22)This report's focus is making global value chains (GVCs) more inclusive. To achieve inclusiveness is by overcoming participation constraints for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and facilitation access for Low Income Developing Countries (LIDCs). The underlying assumption is that most firms in LIDCs are SMEs. Even larger firms in LIDCs are likely to face similar challenges to SMEs, including a less supportive domestic operating environment and weaker institutions that lead to higher fixed costs and challenges to compete on the international markets. The two major points of this report are (1) participation in GVCs is heterogeneous and uneven, across and within countries, and (2) available data and survey-based evidence suggest that SMEs’ participation in GVCs is mostly taking place through indirect contribution to exports, rather than through exporting directly. The report makes the case that policy action, at the national and multilateral level, can make a difference in achieving more inclusive GVCs through: a holistic approach to reform spanning trade, investment, and domestic policies countries and investments in expanding the statistical base and analysis of GVCs and in sharing knowledge on best practices on enabling policies and programs. The report elaborates on three broad areas of recommendations: (1) establishing a trade and investment action plan for inclusiveness defining clear and achievable objectives on trade and investment policy and identifying the necessary complementary domestic policy actions; (2) complementing trade, investment, and domestic policy actions by providing the needed political leadership and support to enhance collaboration across the sectors, and establishing global platforms for sharing best practices; and (3) providing political support for the establishment of a multi-year plan to expand and upgrade the statistical foundation necessary to increase the capacity of all countries to identify and implement policies that can contribute to stronger, more inclusive and sustainable growth and development, globally. -
Publication
Massive Modularity: Understanding Industry Organization in the Digital Age — The Case of Mobile Phone Handsets
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09)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. -
Publication
Measuring Exposure to Risk in Global Value Chains
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-09)How exposed are countries and sectors to GVC risks? GVC participation matters for answering this question. Standard approaches either overstate the degree of backward integration or underestimate the involvement of some industries, especially services, in Global Value Chain (GVC) activity. To correct these biases, this paper proposes a novel comprehensive method to measure GVC participation using Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) linkages in both trade and output and shows that these improvements in methodology matter from a macroeconomic perspective. GVC integration, as measured by the indicators, decreases the exposure to domestic shocks and increases that to global shocks. The paper also finds that exposure to shocks is complex: in most countries and sectors, output is simultaneously exposed to supply and demand shocks. This two-sided exposure suggests that disruptions may not be easily managed by unilateral policy attempts at forcing a reorganization of buyers-seller relationships. -
Publication
Exporter Dynamics and Partial-Year Effects
(American Economic Association, 2017-10)Two identical firms who start exporting in different months, one each in January and December, will report dramatically different exports for the first calendar year. This partial-year effect biases down first-year export levels and biases up first-year export growth rates. For Peruvian exporters, the partial-year bias is large: first-year export levels are understated by 54 percent and the first-year growth rate is overstated by 112 percentage points. Correcting the partial-year effect dramatically reduces first-year export growth rates, raises initial export levels, and almost doubles the contribution of net firm entry and exit to overall export growth. -
Publication
Economic Upgrading through Global Value Chain Participation: Which Policies Increase the Value Added Gains?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-03)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. -
Publication
Vietnam at a Crossroads: Engaging in the Next Generation of Global Value Chains
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-03-07)Vietnam is at a crossroads. It can grow as an export platform for GVCs, specializing in low value-added assembly functions with industrialization occurring in enclaves with little connection to the broader economy or society; or it can leverage the current wave of growth, enabled and accelerated by its successful participation in GVCs, to diversify and move up the chain into higher value-added functions. Success will require Vietnam’s policymakers to view the processes of development differently, and to take new realities of the global economy more fully into account. The purpose of this volume is to support Vietnam’s path to economic prosperity by identifying policies and targeted interventions that will drive development through leveraging GVC participation that take major shifts in trade policy and rapid technological advances in ICT into account. The volume is based on a compilation of studies completed by World Bank staff and external consultants in 2015 supporting the “Enabling Economic Modernization and Private Sector Development” chapter of the Vietnam 2035 report. The objective of these studies was to diagnose Vietnam’s current participation in GVCs, visualize where Vietnam could be by 2035 in the context of a changing global environment, and identify the policy actions needed to get there. The studies also supported topics related more broadly to export competitiveness, including firm-level productivity, services, and connectivity. It then identifies targeted strategies and policy interventions that will help overcome challenges, minimize risks, and maximize opportunities. Readers will gain a strong understanding of Vietnam’s current and potential engagement with GVCs—and will learn about strategic GVC policy tools that can help developing countries achieve economic prosperity in the context of compressed development.