One of the greatest effects of this new trend toward international production is that firms can utilize the comparative advantages of different economies by locating different processes in different countries. A good example of this is the automobile industry. Automobiles have many thousands of parts. Some are highly sophisticated electronics or components that use specialized metal alloys. Some parts require large amounts of capital, research, and skilled engineering inputs, while others are assembled or produced with less skilled labor and little capital. Modern information and communications technologies, along with advances in transportation systems, enable the auto industry to manage the production of parts in many different places simultaneously. Engines may be made in Mexico, transmissions in Japan, electronics in the United States and Canada, brakes in Brazil, and additional parts from many other countries. Most automobiles today contain parts from many countries. Economists refer to this as a global value chain. It implies that each step in the production process can be identified and separated from other steps. Each can be located in a different country or region, but each adds value to the final product. How might global value chains cause the reported U.S. trade deficit with China to be larger than the actual trade deficit