Mahdi Ghodsi has presented at the European Trade Study Group conference. In his presentation (prepared with Jan Hagemejer) "Up or down the value chain? The comparative analysis of the GVC position of the CEECs economies". The paper uses World Input Output Database to analyse the measures of sectoral and country upstreamness - showing the position in the global value chains. The results show that while there has been a great deal of changes in the position of the Central European economies in the World and European supply chains, the structure of exports of the manufacturing sectors have converged over time in the New EU Member states (NMS) and the EU-15 over the analyzed period of 1995 to 2011. While the NMS economies have been producers and exporters of mostly intermediate goods throughout the analysed period , the globalization processes have contributed to a significant increase of intermediate good imports, giving rise to the so-called vertical specialization.

ETSG is the largest annual international economics conference in Europe. This years’ edition hosted over 200 people who presented over 3 days in 7 parallel sessions.