International production sharing: insights from exploratory network analysis

The phenomenon of international production sharing, in which production is broken up into smaller bits of tasks and locate them in separate places, has been observed globally in the last several decades.While it has been getting a lot of attention, it is still not clear how to define and examine the trend.In this paper, some statistical methods borrowed from network analysis and graph theory provide a alternative way to see the pattern and structure of global production network.The availability of new input-output data complements the analysis by providing information on international production link beyond what trade data could reveal.