Assessment of Value Added in Foreign Trade: Modern Approaches

The increase in globalization processes, which accelerated the fragmentation of production chains in the global economy, updated the task of clarifying the contribution of each of the element of the chain to the final result. With the consolidation of foreign economic cooperation, on the one hand, new opportunities have opened up for the inclusion in the international division of labor for more and more countries and companies, and on the other hand, risk threats of destroying or breaking relationships in these global value chains have intensified. This updated the task of specifying the real volumes of export-import turnover, cleared of double counted elements. In the early 2010s almost simultaneously there have been launched 3 basic concepts of export decomposition in the categories of value-added trade, prepared by UNCTAD, OECD and the EU. The system-functional analysis of the proposed approaches made it possible, at the same time, to reveal a number of keen questions that asked for clarification, in particular, the underestimation of intangible assets in creating value-added in exports within the framework of a specific global value chain, the measurement of value-added embedded in re-export (re-import) turnover of the country, etc. These aspects received due coverage in foreign and domestic economic literature. However, the latest developments by foreign specialists of the methodology of decomposing exports into the internal and external components of net production and double counted elements in the domestic scientific turnover are still being introduced with some delay. In this regard, the article set the task of conducting a comparative analysis of the main new results achieved, focusing on the methods introduced by A. Nagengast – R. Stehrer (2014) and A. Borin – M. Mancini (2019). At the same time, the main attention was concentrated on identifying breakthrough methodological "increments." It was revealed that new results are in demand not only in the context of macroeconomic analysis of transformational processes in the global economy, but also to an increasing extent to adjust foreign trade policy and develop ways to mitigate the risks of deterioration of bilateral foreign trade relations.