Marcel Timmer and Gaaitzen de Vries, together with the OECD's Sébastien Miroudot, have published a paper in the Journal of Economic Geography on functional specialization in trade. They propose a new measure that describes in what type of activities a country specializes, given its export pattern and the type of occupations in industries that contribute to those exports. This shows, for example, how higher-income countries specialise more in research and development (R&D) activities and less in fabrication activities. Such statistics can help to better understand the potential for (regional) economic development under global integration.