specific smaller IO tables in detail in Section 3.1. The next step is to calculate a set of indicators that summarize the GVC engagement of each country. We describe the four indicators that we focus on in Section 3.2.

One of the indicators that we calculate is the percent of domestic value added that is contained in the exports of each sub-Saharan African country. This indicator is one of the few instances where detailed information from sub-Saharan Africa appears in World Bank (2017), a highly influential volume containing recent research on the role of GVCs in development. Table 7.4, which is taken from IMF (2015), shows the complement, the percent of foreign value added in exports that is also calculated using the Eora data. While extremely interesting, it only shows the ratio for the aggregate economy. Given the dominance of the agriculture sector in most countries and the importance of domestic value added in agriculture everywhere, the aggregate pattern shown is unlikely to be representative for the comparable fraction in the manufacturing sector, which is our primary interest. We discuss both the aggregate fraction and the fraction for manufacturing in Section 3.5.

The other GVC indicators that measure the importance of foreign input sourcing and exporting of intermediate inputs or final products are also calculated separately for all sectors (in each country). They record interactions with eight different regions in the world, two of which are defined relative to the country of interest, and they are available for three years that are each ten years apart (1995, 2005, 2015). Together these are more indicators than can be easily described in this report. We therefore make all four indicators that are each defined at the level of (i) the African country of interest, (ii) eight domestic sectors, (iii) eight partner regions (including itself), and (iv) three years, available in a data file.

The overarching message from the analysis is that the large increase in international trade and the disintegration of production chains that the world economy has witnessed over the last 15-20 years has touched the manufacturing sectors in most sub-Saharan countries only lightly. Two patterns underscore this conclusion. Foreign sourcing of intermediates has increased a lot more than firms’ own exporting activities. The extent of international engagement by domestic firms in sub-Saharan Africa also remains vastly smaller than that of multinational firms active in the region.

Taglioni and Winter (2014) show in a case study for the agribusiness in 2012 that the GVC engagement of firms in Ghana, Kenya, and Mozambique lagged that of Vietnamese firms. According to our results, the average values across those three African countries of the three GVC indicators that we consider, is almost exactly the same as for the entire group of subSaharan countries we study here. It suggests that the lagging GVC integration is common to much of the region’s economy. At the same time, our results also identify countries which are ahead of the average. It is remarkable that not a single country exceeds the region’s average on all three indicators. If we focus on the two indicators that measure foreign sourcing and export participation of (smaller) domestic firms, 10 of the 44 countries score above average on both. However, this group is mainly composed of smaller countries which tend to be more 4