Discussion paper

DP13482 International Buyers' Sourcing and Suppliers' Markups in Bangladeshi Garments

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.

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Citation

Macchiavello, R, J Cajal-Grossi and G Noguera (2019), ‘DP13482 International Buyers' Sourcing and Suppliers' Markups in Bangladeshi Garments‘, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 13482. CEPR Press, Paris & London. https://cepr.org/publications/dp13482