Adding Value to Trade Measures: Understanding Canada’s Role in Global Value Chains

This briefing drills down to explore how value-added trade measures complement traditional measures, yielding unexpected insights into Canada’s real trade dependence, its trade with major trading partners, and on the importance of services to trade.

Document Highlights

This briefing is the second in a series exploring the concept of value-added trade and how it affects understanding of Canada’s trade relationships with the rest of the world. The value-added trade approach offers a complementary methodology to conventional ways of measuring trade—one that eliminates the double counting of imports and exports and redistributes the value of traded goods and services to the country and to the industry that contributed to their creation. This alternative measure sheds more light on Canada’s linkages into global value chains, showing them to be predominantly limited to the United States. It also demonstrates the interconnectedness of industries in creating the value of tradable goods and services. These findings have implications for both government policy-makers and businesses involved in trade, as we detail in this briefing.