Possible Causes of the Recent Slowdown in World Trade

This was a team project detailing the causes and consequences of the trade slowdown in the 2011-2016 period. After the “bounce back” from the 2009 recession, trade did not pick up as quickly as expected, nor did it reach pre-recession levels. This paper looks at the reasons why it may not have reached those levels, and includes an original regression analysis on the importance of the differenct factors we determined as relevant to causing the slowdown.

For my part, I was responsible for researching the rise of global value chains (GVCs) in the production process, and determining how much of an effect the lack of growth in GVCs contributed to the slowdown.