The Automotive Supply Chain in Europe: An Input-Output Analysis of Value Added and Employment Composition

This paper studies the automotive supply chain in four European countries (Germany, France, UK and Italy). First, employing WIOD data (Timmer et al., 2015) processed via Trade-SCAN (Roman et al., 2019), we decompose the domestic and imported inputs of production, focusing on the region and industry of origin of the contribution to show how the configuration of the automotive supply chain evolved between 2000 and 2014. The analysis focuses on the four dimensions, i.e. employment, value added, profits and labour compensation, to assess the evolution of the costs of production of the domestic and imported segments of the supply chain. We show that the imported component increases its costs in all countries except Germany, where domestic costs increase faster than imported ones. Notably, this trend can be imputed to the faster increase of the profit component of value added, rather than labour compensation. Second, we decompose the employment participating in the supply chain according to its occupational structure combining input-output data with labour Force Survey data. This analysis shows that there is a generalised upgrading trend in the occupational composition of the automotive supply chain, which involves both domestic and imported labour.