Measuring the Average Position of Russian Industries in Global Value Chains

With the most relevant input-output table data for the Russian economy, the presented study considers and calculates the measure of Upstreamness, which reflects the average position of the industries in a representative value chain. The obtained values can be considered as intuitive in terms of industry position in global value chains, including the ranking of technologically closely related pairs of industries. The paper also demonstrates that the average positions of the industries in a representative value chain calculated using input-output table data from different countries are largely comparable, indicating that the Upstreamness measure is universal to some extent, regardless of the country of origin of the goods. Calculated Upstreamness was used to show the main trends of Russian foreign trade in terms of position in global value chains. In particular, it is shown that the Russian economy in the last 3-4 years has tended to change the structure of exports in favor of more final products, and the structure of imports in favor of less final products. This fact can be interpreted as expansion of the Russian economy's participation in global value chains. Despite this, the structure of Russian exports is still significantly different from the structure of exports of comparable countries. On the contrary, the structure of Russian imports can be viewed as generally consistent with the import structure of many developed countries. The calculated Upstreamness measure may have various applications in empirical studies of the Russian economy.