Offshoring, reshoring, and the location of production: What can we measure in a cross-country industry-level setting?

Geopolitical tensions, security concerns, and the COVID-19 supply chain disruptions have prompted countries to reconsider their reliance on the origin of the inputs they use in production. Consequently, policy makers and researchers are increasingly interested in understanding shoring strategies and patterns of production relocation. While the interest in shoring has surged, the literature offers ample measures for (off-, re-, near-, friend-) shoring, ranging from intuitively appealing, simple indicators to more sophisticated, complex metrics based on input-output techniques. Those measures come with specific trade-offs and assumptions. Without a proper understanding of these measures, empirical analyses – and the policies based on them – risk being misinformed. Against this background, this paper compares five different measures – so-called domestic participation indicators (DPIs) – that aim to measure shoring and production locations. In particular, we examine how they behave under different forms of shoring. We use global multiregional input-output (GMRIO) tables from the OECD, covering 45 industries in 76 countries, to track the development of the five DPIs through the stages of (de-)globalisation between 1995 and 2022. We find that the direct DPIs explain the trends in globalisation well.