Evaluating estimates of materials offshoring from US manufacturingRobert Feenstra and J. Jensen () Economics Letters, 2012, vol. 117, issue 1, 170-173 Abstract: 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 industries have differences below 50 percentage points in the two estimates, there are a significant number of cases that differ by 10 percentage points or more. Keywords: Offshoring; Proportionality; Import comparability (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:117:y:2012:i:1:p:170-173 DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2012.04.069 Access Statistics for this article Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier |
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