# Annex 1 Description of the Dashboard Approach and Its Integration into the Online GVC Module on WITS

The MC‐GVC database<sup>20</sup> is a rich source of information that can be used for several purposes beyond the exploration of broad trends in world GVC trade which have been the main topic of the present work, including cross‐country assessment of which are the main GVC participation drivers, through the use of econometric tools and various kinds of statistical analyses. Among the latter, one novel instrument developed by World Bank staff and recently made available to the general public, through the introduction of an online GVC module integrated into the WITS interface, is the GVC Trade Dashboards approach, which draws on the MC‐GVC dataset extensive information and introduces a novel tool to provide insight on the characteristics and dynamics of GVC trade at varying depths and aggregation levels, by exploiting different dimensions of the data and presenting results in a systematic and comparable way.

With the help of the GVC Module on WITS, it is possible to build customized trade dashboards providing insight at the inter‐regional, intra‐regional and country levels of analysis, as well as concerning products of interest for any given individual country. The module’s WITS interface allows the user to choose not only the countries and regions of interest,<sup>21</sup> the years of the analysis, the appropriate edition of the HS nomenclature<sup>22</sup> and whether to rely on reported or mirror data for exports and/or imports, but also the comparator countries (though offering a customized default list in each case<sup>23</sup> ), the number of products of interest in each GVC category, and even some flexibility in the aggregation of GVC categories themselves.<sup>24</sup> To the present day, World Bank staff have extensively used this tool in different applications, providing so far insight on the extent and characteristics of GVC engagement of countries including Tunisia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Poland, as well as several intra and inter‐regional analyses concerning the regions to which these countries belong. To illustrate how the tool works in practice, we will walk through an example of trade dashboards at the country level, which is the most extensive and complex of all three levels of analysis, integrating “country analysis” and “products of interest analysis” outputs from the WITS GVC Module. For this

> 20 See <u>http://blogs.worldbank.org/trade/new‐tool‐monitoring‐global‐value‐chains</u> for a description of how to access and use the MC‐GVC database.

> 21 The GVC Dashboard uses the following 7 regions as defined in the World Bank Developing Indicators database: East Asia – Pacific (EAS), Europe‐Central Asia (ECS), Latin America‐Caribbean (LCN), Middle East‐North Africa (MEA), North America (NAC), South Asia (SAS), and Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA).

22 Analysis can be carried out in any of the five editions of the Harmonized System (HS) nomenclature: H0 (HS 1988/92), H1 (HS 1996), H2 (HS 2002), H3 (HS 2007) or H4 (HS 2012).

23 The comparator countries in the automatically preselected list are chosen based on the results drawn from an algorithm which uses data on countries’ GDP and population to calculate the Manhattan distances from each of them to the country under analysis and ranks them based on their “proximity” to it. Thus, this algorithm allows to identify the set of the most proximate countries according to this criterion. However, the module interface allows for user flexibility in customizing this default list in order to incorporate other relevant qualitative features which may lead to the exclusion of some of the original candidates to the shortlist, as well as to the incorporation of other countries not initially included in it.

24 For example, apparel and footwear can be aggregated together or not, and final motor vehicles can be pooled together or split between passenger vehicles and commercial vehicles.

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