Three Empirical Studies in International Economics

This dissertation comprises three essays investigating (1) the bilateral linkages in the global value chains, and (2) the impacts of fluctuations in crude oil price on national trade accounts. The first chapter assesses the role of Singapore in the international production network across two decades. We identify the country’s upstream and downstream channels as well as the key sectors involved in the supply chains. The second chapter expands the global value chains analysis to a larger group of countries – CPTPP. Using the most recent accounting framework to trace value-added trade embedded in gross exports, we develop formula to identify bilateral upstream and downstream partners on both country and sector levels. We also construct measures to characterize the position of each country in the global value chains. CPTPP countries demonstrate deep integration in the global production networks with strong dependency on one another. Despite not being part of the group, China and the US play important roles in transferring contents with CPTPP countries along the supply chains. The third chapter employs a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model to investigate the impacts of oil price fluctuations on external accounts of oil-importing and oil-exporting countries. The results show that demand and supply shocks in the crude oil market have diverse impacts on economic activities and trade accounts. In addition, durables trade demonstrated more volatile responses towards oil price shocks than non-durables trade.