The Skill Content of Value-Added Exports and Populist Voting Behavior

Details

Supervisors

Vannoorenberghe, Gonzague

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [60] en sciences économiques, orientation générale

Abstract

enGross trade statistics record where goods cross borders, not where value is created so they miss the linkages that propagate through the value chain. This paper examines one such linkage: the foreign value added share of exports and its relationship with populist voting. We measure populism by the volume margin of Docquier et al. (2026). Because a large part of what any country exports is already embedded in the chain, removing the double counting in gross trade statistics changes which countries look exposed to globalisation. Estimating by Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood with country and year fixed effects, a one percentage point widening of the gap between low-skill and high-skill foreign value added share is associated with an increase of approximately 10.6% in the populist volume margin (β = 0.101, SE 0.049, p = 0.040; 269 observations across 39 countries). The effect is concentrated entirely in left-wing populism (β = 0.303, SE 0.088, p < 0.01), with no detectable right-wing response. The asymmetry is what Rodrik's (2021) framework predicts rather than an anomaly. Production fragmentation is a trade and investment shock and such shocks activate the income cleavage and mobilise the left. The ethno-national cleavage that mobilises the right is activated by immigration. Significance holds when sector shares are weighted by export value, though the coefficient falls by roughly half. Whether exposure is measured by simple mean or by export weight therefore determines what one concludes about who globalisation harms. Offshoring and import competition activate different politics and treating them as interchangeable obscures a distinction voters appear to be making