You are here

International Buyers’ Sourcing and Suppliers’ Markups in Bangladeshi Garments

19 June 2019
2:00 pm
Ex-Boccherini Building (Piazza San Ponziano, 6) - Conference Room

Large international buyers play a key role in global value chains. We exploit detailed transaction-level data on the usage of material inputs to study how Bangladeshi garment suppliers’ markups vary across international buyers. We find substantial dispersion in markups across export orders of a given seller for the same product. Buyer effects explain a significant share of this variation, while destination effects do not. Buyers adopting relational sourcing strategies pay higher markups than non-relational buyers. This pattern holds within seller-product-year combinations, is robust to controlling for the buyer’s size, traded volumes, and quality, and, together with larger volumes, implies higher profits for suppliers dealing with relational buyers.

Keywords: Markups, Sourcing Strategies, Global Buyers, Buyer-Driven Value Chains. JEL Codes: L11, L14, D23, F63

relatore: 
Guillermo Noguera - Yale University and CAGE
Units: 
AXES