The Tuesday Lunch Series welcomes Xiao Jiang, assistant professor of economics and philosophy, politics and economics at Denison, presenting “Value-added Erosion in Global Value Chains: Rethinking International Trade.” The prevalence of “vertical specialization” and global value chains (GVCs) in today’s world demands us to think about international trade and its relationship to employment differently. Moreover, inherent to the surge of trade in intermediates in GVCs is often the decline in shares of domestic value added in a country’s exports. In this talk, Jiang will discuss his findings on the employment effect of GVCs trade and put forward the argument that the expansion of foreign high value-adding activities in the upper stream of GVCs is likely to lead to a decline of domestic value-added share, thus the intensification of international and domestic distributional conflicts.