Essays on the application of multi-region input-output analysis on international trade

International trade is constantly growing in importance, but also in complexity. Production chains become increasingly fragmented geographically and intermediaries often cross several borders before being assembled to a final product. This poses challenges for two areas this thesis attempts to contribute to: the inability of traditional trade measures to capture global value chains and national accounting of CO2 emissions. Using input-output methodology a measure for trade in value added is constructed and applied on the question of the importance of services as input to traded commodities. As a result we find that services are important inputs in a country's export industry and are crucial for the competitiveness of the export sectors. The methodology is then extended to construct a multi-region input-output table to assess the content of CO2 emissions in international trade. With this method we construct traditional measures for national CO2 emissions based on geographic borders but also national CO2 inventories based on consumption. We find that traditional measures for national CO2 emissions can lead to ineffective climate change agreements. The reason is, that those measures allow for the reduction of national CO2 emissions by outsourcing production activities to developing countries but keeping consumption-patterns unchanged. Finally, in the last chapter of this thesis we test for the hypothesis that per capita CO2 emissions decrease as countries develop, a so called Environmental Kuznets Curve. Using our measures for national CO2 emissions based on geographic borders and consumption, we find that consumption-patterns of nations increase linear with development indicating not sustainable patterns of global CO2 consumption.eingereicht von: Patrick TombergerAbweichender Titel laut Übersetzung der Verfasserin/des VerfassersLinz, Univ., Diss., 2015OeBB(VLID)77691