Evaluating Estimates of Materials Offshoring from U.S. Manufacturing / Robert C. Feenstra, J. Bradford Jensen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Feenstra, Robert C.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Jensen, J. Bradford.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w17916.

NBER working paper series no. w17916

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2012.

Summary:

When materials offshoring is measured by estimating imported intermediate inputs, a common assumption used is that an industry's imports of each input, relative to its total demand, is the same as the economy-wide imports relative to total demand: this is the so-called "import comparability" or "proportionality" assumption. A report to the National Research Council identified this assumption as being a significant limitation of current data collection and analysis. In this note we move beyond this assumption to obtain a direct measure of imported materials by industry for the United States in 1997. At the 3-digit I-O industry level, there is a correlation of 0.68 between the offshoring shares made with and without the proportionality assumption, and a higher correlation of 0.87 when the shares are value weighted. While most value-weighted industry have differences below 50 percentage points in the two estimates, there is significant number of cases that differ by 10 percentage points or more.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2012.