open to trade everywhere. Only a few large countries, in particular Cameroon, Chad and Tanzania, have firms that are systematically more than average globally engaged.<sup>4</sup> The main message from the analysis based on the input-output tables is similar: foreign sourcing is rising more quickly than exporting. One summary measure that underscores this evolution is the decline in the domestic value added to gross exports ratio for the manufacturing sector in exactly half of the countries in the sample. The same measure increases for most countries when calculated economy-wide, but this gives a biased impression as it is inflated by the rising importance of the service industry. Apart from the low overall GVC engagement, the input-output results also show the remarkably low regional integration of production. At the same time, neighboring or more distant sub-Saharan countries were systematically the regions that showed the most variation in importance across countries. It implies that some strong local value chains exists – in particular the economies around South Africa are more strongly integrated in that production network.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we discuss the information contained in the WBES, the fraction of each country’s exports that the surveys represent, and the results on firm-level and country-level indicators of GVC engagement that we calculate from this data. In Section 3 we discuss how we constructed similar indicators of GVC engagement at the industry-level using the multi-region input-output table of Eora. We illustrate a number of patterns for the sub-Saharan African region, averaging over individual countries, focusing explicitly on the inputs sourced from various regions and the nature of the export linkages between different regions. In the conclusions, in Section 4, we highlight a few patterns that stand out using both data sources.

# **2. Firm-level information on input sourcing and sales destinations**

## **2.1 World Bank Enterprise Survey**

Through the Enterprise Surveys portal, the World Bank makes a series of firm-level datasets available to researchers.<sup>5</sup> They are based on surveys of random samples of firms conducted in all developing countries, which are surveyed at semi-regular intervals using the same questionnaire. This survey tool has been developed over several years, based on the experiences with the Regional Program of Enterprise Development (RPED) that surveyed firms in several African countries between 1991 and 1996 and the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Surveys (BEEPS) which is an ongoing project surveying countries in Europe and central Asia.<sup>6</sup>

> 4 Other, smaller economies in this category include Benin, Djibouti, Lesotho, Mauritania, Mauritius, Niger, and Togo.

> 5 All data is freely downloadable at http://www.enterprisesurveys.org/.

> 6 The older RPED data can be downloaded from the data portal of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University: https://www.csae.ox.ac.uk/data. More recent BEEPS data is integrated in the Enterprise - Surveys portal, but additional information and complete data from 1999 to 2016 can be found at https://ebrd <u>beeps.com/data/.</u>

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