Value added content of trade: A comprehensive approach

•The letter provides an approach to measure value added content of exports and imports.•It discusses how this relates to other recent literature.•It provides results over time based on a new database.

This letter provides an approach to decompose the value added content of trade into foreign and domestic components when intermediates are traded. The measure adds to the existing literature by considering both exports and imports simultaneously. In this way this approach generalizes the commonly applied vertical specialization measures based on exports only which are encompassed.