scholarly journals Capitalist crisis in the “age of global value chains”

2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2110067
Author(s):  
Jennifer Bair ◽  
Mathew Mahutga ◽  
Marion Werner ◽  
Liam Campling
Keyword(s):  
Value Chain ◽  
Global Value Chains ◽  
Value Chains ◽  
Global Value Chain ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
World Development Report ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
World Development

In this article, we analyze the strategies, surprises, and sidesteps in the World Bank’s 2020 World Development Report, Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains. Strategically, the Report promotes an expansion of neoliberal globalization couched in the language of global value chains. Curiously detached from the broader academic literature on global value chains in international trade, it promotes a sequentialist vision of global value chain upgrading that evokes the stagism of classic modernization theory. The authors sidestep important issues, such as China's pivotal role in the landscape of global trade, and are largely silent on others, including climate change. Significantly and somewhat surprisingly, given the general endorsement of global value chain integration, the Report acknowledges negative distributional trends associated with the rise of global value chains, including the excessive benefits reaped by “superstar firms” and the now well-documented decline in labor's income share. These observations are not reflected in the document's policy section, however, where the World Development Report largely recapitulates familiar prescriptions, with the threat of nationalist populism and rising protectionism providing a new bottle for this old wine. Drawing on a range of literature including United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's 2018 Trade and Development Report, we highlight not only the limits of the Bank's adherence to an increasingly embattled orthodoxy, but also the necessary starting points for a more useful discussion of the merits, limits, and future of global value chains.

scholarly journals Oligopoly-driven development: The Word Bank’s Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains in perspective

2021 ◽  
pp. 102452942199535
Author(s):  
Benjamin Selwyn ◽  
Dara Leyden
Keyword(s):  
Value Chain ◽  
Global Value Chains ◽  
Value Chains ◽  
Global Value Chain ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Trade Theory ◽  
Trading Partners ◽  
Immanent Critique ◽  
Theoretical Foundations ◽  
World Development

The World Development Report 2020 (WDR2020) asserts that global value chains raise productivity and incomes, create better jobs and reduce poverty, and proposes state policies to facilitate global value chain-based development. We deploy an immanent critique of WDR2020 to interrogate its claims regarding wages and working conditions. Using the Report’s own evidence, we identify contradictions in its claims, which stem from its use of comparative advantage trade theory to reconceptualize global value chain relations. This perspective predicts mutual gains between trading partners, but its core assumptions are incompatible with the realities of global value chains, in which (mostly Northern) oligopolistic lead firms capture value from (mostly Southern) suppliers and workers. We show how WDR2020 conceals these contradictions by misconstruing, inverting and ignoring evidence (particularly of labour’s agency), whilst failing to recommend redistributive measures for the unequal outcomes that it recognizes. By redeploying heterodox conceptions of monopoly capital and by using a class-relational approach, we scrutinize WDR2020's overly positive portrayal of lead firms. We provide alternative theoretical foundations to better explain the evidence within the Report, which shows that global value chains concentrate wealth, exacerbate inequalities and constrain social upgrading – with negative consequences for supplier firm workers in developing countries.

A Portrait of Global Value Chain Linkages of Indian Manufacturing

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-250
Author(s):  
Ketan Reddy ◽  
Subash Sasidharan
Keyword(s):  
Value Chain ◽  
Global Value Chains ◽  
Value Chains ◽  
Global Value Chain ◽  
Value Addition ◽  
Jel Codes ◽  
Country Level ◽  
Forward Integration ◽  
Shed Light

This article provides an overview of India’s participation in global value chains (GVCs). Using multiple databases at the aggregate and industry levels, this article documents the trends in GVC participation of India during the last three decades. Authors further differentiate between India’s backward and forward integration at the country level before evaluating the industry-specific dynamics of GVCs in India. In this study, authors also shed light upon the rising servicification of Indian manufacturing, and highlight the importance of services’ value addition in promoting GVC integration of India. JEL Codes: F1, F15, D57

scholarly journals Competitive Conditions in Global Value Chain Networks: An Assessment Using Entropy and Network Analysis

Entropy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 1068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgios Angelidis ◽  
Evangelos Ioannidis ◽  
Georgios Makris ◽  
Ioannis Antoniou ◽  
Nikos Varsakelis
Keyword(s):  
Value Chain ◽  
Value Added ◽  
Value Chains ◽  
Global Value Chain ◽  
Degree Centrality ◽  
Sector Structure ◽  
Input Output ◽  
Weighted Degree ◽  
The World ◽  
Weighted Degree Centrality

We investigated competitive conditions in global value chains (GVCs) for a period of fifteen years (2000–2014), focusing on sector structure, countries’ dominance and diversification. For this purpose, we used data from the World Input–Output Database (WIOD) and examined GVCs as weighted directed networks, where countries are the nodes and value added flows are the edges. We compared the in-and out-weighted degree centralization of the sectoral GVC networks in order to detect the most centralized, on the import or export side, respectively (oligopsonies and oligopolies). Moreover, we examined the in- and out-weighted degree centrality and the in- and out-weight entropy in order to determine whether dominant countries are also diversified. The empirical results reveal that diversification (entropy) and dominance (degree) are not correlated. Dominant countries (rich) become more dominant (richer). Diversification is not conditioned by competitiveness.

scholarly journals The financialisation–offshoring nexus and the capital accumulation of US non-financial firms

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 1183-1218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tristan Auvray ◽  
Joel Rabinovich
Keyword(s):  
Financial Markets ◽  
Value Chain ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Global Value Chains ◽  
Value Chains ◽  
Global Value Chain ◽  
Financial Assets ◽  
Financial Firms ◽  
Productive Activities ◽  
Panel Regressions

Abstract The financialisation of non-financial corporations has drawn the attention of many scholars who have identified two main channels through which financialisation occurs: a higher proportion of financial assets compared to non-financial ones and a higher amount of resources diverted to financial markets. A consequence of this process is a decrease in investment. Parallel to financialisation, many non-financial corporations have also engaged in an internationalisation of their productive activities, organising them under global value chains. Though offshoring may also explain the decrease in the level of investment of non-financial firms, the intersections between the literature on financialisation and the literature on global value chain remain surprisingly underdeveloped. This paper contributes to fill this gap using panel regressions for US non-financial corporations between 1995 and 2011. We find evidence that both offshoring and financialisation are determinants to the decrease in investment and that financialisation occurs mainly among firms belonging to sectors prone to offshoring.

scholarly journals Global Value Chain Governance in the MNE: A Dynamic Hierarchy Perspective

2022 ◽  
pp. 000812562110685
Author(s):  
Paul Ryan ◽  
Giulio Buciuni ◽  
Majella Giblin ◽  
Ulf Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Value Chain ◽  
Multinational Enterprise ◽  
Global Value Chains ◽  
Value Chains ◽  
Global Value Chain ◽  
Global Efficiency ◽  
Supply Line ◽  
Severe Shock ◽  
Crisis Conditions ◽  
Managerial Response

The pandemic crisis caused a severe shock to global value chains and led to supply shortages for complex medical goods such as respiratory ventilators. What followed were calls to reshore production for security, and the loss of efficiencies from foreign global value chain (GVC) operations for the multinational enterprise. This article merges internalization and GVC theory to demonstrate a dynamic hierarchy managerial response to these crisis conditions. An optimally configured GVC under hierarchy governance can resiliently eliminate global supply line ruptures yet maintain the benefits of global efficiency.

scholarly journals Exercising associational and networked power through the use of digital technology by workers in global value chains

2020 ◽  
pp. 102452942090328
Author(s):  
Nicole Helmerich ◽  
Gale Raj-Reichert ◽  
Sabrina Zajak
Keyword(s):  
Value Chain ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Production Management ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Global Value Chains ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Value Chains ◽  
Global Value Chain ◽  
Power Resources ◽  
Footwear Industry

While there are heated debates about how digitalization affects production, management and consumption in the context of global value chains, less attention is paid to how workers use digital technologies to organize and formulate demands and hence exercise power. This paper explores how workers in supplier factories in global value chains use different digital tools to exercise and enhance their power resources to improve working conditions. Combining the global value chain framework and concepts from labour sociology on worker power, the paper uses examples from the garment industry in Honduras and the footwear industry in China to show how workers used old and new digital tools to create and enhance associational and networked powers. Digital tools were used by workers and their allies in the global value chain to lower costs of communication, increase information exchange and participate in transnational campaigns during labour struggles vis-à-vis firms and governments in structurally and politically repressive environments. The paper contributes to our understanding of how workers use of digital technologies to exercise and combine different resources of power in online and offline actions in global value chains, as well as how they are confronted by new dimensions of constrains which include digital surveillance and control by the state.

scholarly journals The intensification of foreign trade in post-socialist countries and their role in global value chains

2016 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Cieślik ◽  
Jadwiga Biegańska ◽  
Stefania Środa-Murawska
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Value Chain ◽  
Global Value Chains ◽  
Value Chains ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Global Value Chain ◽  
Western European ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
Complex Methods ◽  
The Eu

This article presents the transformation of foreign trade in 10 post-socialist countries, current members of the EU. Special focus is given to the more significant role these countries began to play in global value chains (GVCs) as a result of liberalisation processes and integration within the EU. In addition, the article evaluates their place in global vertical specialisation. To locate each country on a global value chain and to compare them with selected countries, more complex methods of measuring the level of participation of European post-socialist countries in GVCs were employed. These methods allow the position of a country downstream or upstream in GVCs to be established. We concluded that (a) post-socialist countries differ in the levels of their participation in GVCs. Countries that have stronger links with Western European countries, especially with Germany, are more integrated; (b) a large share of post-socialist countries’ exports pass through Western European GVCs; (c) most exporters in Central and Eastern Europe are positioned in downstream segments of production rather than upstream markets.

scholarly journals The ‘factory manager dilemma’: Purchasing practices and environmental upgrading in apparel global value chains

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 766-789 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahwish J Khan ◽  
Stefano Ponte ◽  
Peter Lund-Thomsen
Keyword(s):  
Value Chain ◽  
Global Value Chains ◽  
Global South ◽  
Value Chains ◽  
Global Value Chain ◽  
Social Upgrading

Economic and environmental upgrading in global value chains are intertwined processes. The existing global value chain literature has so far articulated the relationships between economic and social upgrading but has only recently started to explore the challenges of environmental upgrading from the perspective of suppliers in the Global South. In this article, we examine the ‘factory manager dilemma’ as a way of conceptualising the purchasing practices and environmental upgrading requirements faced by suppliers in their dealings with lead firms in global value chains. Specifically, we analyse the environmental upgrading challenges experienced by Pakistani apparel firms. We conclude that Pakistani apparel suppliers are required both to absorb the consequences of global buyers’ unsustainable purchasing practices and to reduce their own profitability – all in the name of sustainability.

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