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Forthcoming

Andrew Bernard, Emmanuel Dhyne, Glenn Magerman, Kalina Manova, Andreas Moxnes

The Origins of Firm Heterogeneity: A Production Network Approach

This paper explores firm size heterogeneity in production networks. Using all buyer-supplier relationships in Belgium, the paper shows that firms with more customers havehigher total sales but lower sales per customer and lower market shares among thosecustomers. A decomposition of firm sales reveal...

2024

Johannes Jäger, Ewa Dziwok (Eds.)

Understanding Green Finance: A Critical Assessment and Alternative Perspectives

Exploring how green finance has become a key strategy for the financial industry in the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis, this timely book critically assesses the current dominant forms of neoliberal green finance. Understanding Green Finance delivers a pioneering analysis of the topic, covering...

2024

Caio Torres Mazzi, Gideon Ndubuisi, Elvis Avendo

Learning-by-exporting in South Africa: The influence of global value chain (GVC) participation and technological capability

Using the South African Revenue Service and National Treasury firm-level panel data for 2009–2017, this paper investigates how trade related to the global value chain (GVC) affects the performance of manufacturing firms in South Africa. The paper uses extant classifications of internationally trad...

2024

Federico Colozza, Carlo Pietrobelli, Antonio Vezzani

Do global value chains spread knowledge and pollution? evidence from EU regions

In this paper we investigate the relationship between participation in global value chains and the environment from a spatial perspective. By drawing on an original dataset on global value chain participation, emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulphur oxides, and green patents for European regions, w...

2023

Melanie Müller, Christina Saulich, Meike Schulze, Svenja Schöneich

From Competition to a Sustainable Raw Materials Diplomacy

German and European businesses are highly dependent on metals. Demand for these raw materials is expected to grow even further as they will be needed for the green energy and electric mobility tran­sition, digitalisation and other emerging technologies. Geopolitical developments influence securi...

2023

Inga Carry, Melanie Müller, Nadine Godehardt

The Future of European-Chinese Raw Material Supply Chains

When it comes to being supplied with raw materials, Europe faces a number of chal­lenges. These include the diversification of European supply chains, the implementation of effective sustainability standards, and the reduction of strategic dependencies on China. What will European-Chinese raw mater...

2023

Mike Morris

Chinese Firms and Adherence to Global Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Standards in Developing Countries: Is there Potential to Create Common Ground?

This paper focuses on analysing how Chinese firms operate in Latin America, Asia and Africa in regard to ESG (environmental, social and governance) standards and sustainability issues. How do they respond to the increasing global value chain requirement to incorporate and maintain ESG standards? Is ...

2023

Nora Aboushady, Chahir Zaki

Are Global Value Chains for Sale? On Business-State Relations in the MENA Region

We use new data on political connections from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys to examine the impact of connections on firms’ participation in global value chains (GVCs) for six MENA countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon). In addition to political connect...

2023

“Sustainable global supply chains in times of geopolitical crises” Annual Report 2023

The overarching topic of this year's report is "The Role of Geopolitics in Global Supply Chains", highlighting ways in which recent geopolitical and geo-economic developments are shaping and influencing current debates and policy processes around global supply chains (GSCs). Following forewords from...

2023

Ibrahim Nana, Martin Paul Jr. Tabe-Ojong

Evolution of Global Value Chains Participation and Economic Growth in Africa

Global value chains offer countries unique opportunities to participate in and benefit from international trade by specializing in specific production stages and tasks. The objective of this study is twofold: (i) to investigate the evolution of African countries participation in global value ch...

2023

Penny Bamber, Karina Fernandez-Stark, Oswaldo Molina

Innovation and competitiveness in the copper-mining GVC: developing local suppliers in Peru

Although Peru is one of the main producers of copper worldwide, the domestic industry has not yet fully taken advantage of the potential that the exploitation of this commodity offers. This paper explores the opportunities and challenges that Peruvian suppliers face in their insertion into the minin...

2023

Penny Bamber & Karina Fernandez-Stark

Digital Technologies in the Mining GVCs: A Path to Reduce Gender Gaps in the Industry

2023

Almut Schilling-Vacaflor & Maria-Therese Gustafsson

Towards more sustainable global supply chains? Company compliance with new human rights and environmental due diligence laws

Binding regulations have, recently, emerged in the Global North with the aim of holding companies accountable for environmental and/or human rights impacts throughout their supply chains. This article develops and applies an analytical framework to analyze corporate accountability dynamics in global...

2023

Almut Schilling Vacaflor & Andrea Lenschow

Hardening foreign corporate accountability through mandatory due diligence in the European Union? New trends and persisting challenges

The negative externalities of global commodity chains and existing governance gaps have received wide scholarly attention. Indeed, many sectors including forest-risk commodities (FRCs) like soy and beef from Brazil remain largely unregulated. This article analyzes ongoing policy-making processes at ...

2023

Svenja Schöneich, Christina Saulich and Melanie Müller

Traceability and foreign corporate accountability in mineral supply chains

Industrialized economies in the EU depend heavily on imports of minerals. The extraction and parts of the transport and processing of these minerals take place in the Global South and often bear high human rights and environmental risks. A lack of traceability in mineral supply chains makes it parti...

2023

Ben Shepherd

Regional integration and services in African value chains: Retrospect and prospect

This article takes a first step towards understanding the quantitative evidence on the role of services in African value chains. The available data are largely based on assumptions and modelled estimates, but can nonetheless provide some useful information at an aggregate level. In general, services...

2023

Johannes Jäger, Gonzalo Duran, Lukas Schmidt

Expected economic effects of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD)

This study assesses the possible economic impacts of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (EU CSDDD). On the theoretical level, perspectives from neoclassical economics are combined with the value chain approach, and with the power resources perspective. Empirically, this study...

2023

Angela Heucher, Judith Ihl, Michèle Kiefer, Marcus Kaplan, Steffen Schmok, Kathrin Wolf

The Promotion of Sustainable Supply Chains Through German Development Cooperation Based on the Example of the Textile Sector

German development cooperation is pursuing the objective of reducing negative social and environmental effects in global (textile) supply chains and thus, in the long term, contributing to designing them more sustainably. This evaluation examines, in particular, the interaction between various devel...

2023

Haiou Mao, Holger Görg, Guopei Fang

Time to say goodbye? The impact of environmental regulation on foreign divestment

We look at divestments by foreign firms – a topic that has received comparatively little attention in the literature – and investigate how changes in the regulatory environment in the host country may impact on such divestment decisions. We use the implementation of China’s Two Control Zone (T...

2023

Tekalign Gutu Sakketa

Urbanisation and rural development in sub-Saharan Africa: A review of pathways and impacts

This paper reviews the current state of literature on the impacts of urbanisation on rural development in the context of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with special emphasis to the pathways through which urbanisation affect rural economic development. Assessments of these effects diverge greatly. While s...

2023

Holger Görg, Anna JAcobs, Saskia Meuchelböck

Who is to suffer? Quantifying the impact of sanctions on German firms

In this paper, we use a novel firm level dataset for Germany to investigate the effect of sanctions on export behaviour and performance of German firms. More specifically, we study the sanctions imposed by the EU against Russia in 2014 in response to the annexation of Crimea and Russia's countermeas...

2023

Janina Grabs and Rachael D. Garrett

Goal‑Based Private Sustainability Governance and Its Paradoxes in the Indonesian Palm Oil Sector

In response to stakeholder pressure, companies increasingly make ambitious forward-looking sustainability commitments. They then draw on corporate policies with varying degrees of alignment to disseminate and enforce corresponding behavioral rules among their suppliers and business partners. This go...

2023

Andreas M. Fischer, Philipp Herkenhoff, Philipp Sauré

Identifying Chinese supply shocks: Effects on trade labor markets

An influential literature estimates the impact of trade on labor markets with shift-share instrumental variable designs under the assumption that common demand shocks in advanced economies are negligible. This article documents empirical patterns, which suggest that such common demand shocks are pre...

2023

Bernard Hoekman and Marco Sanfilippo

Trade and value chain participation: Domestic firms and FDI spillovers in Africa

Data on the location of foreign direct investment (FDI) projects within and across African nations are com- bined with firm-level survey data and information on sectoral input–output relationships to assess what types of FDI are more likely to influence participation in global value chains (GVCs) ...

2023

Leonardo Baccini, Arianna Bondi, Matteo Fiorini, Bernard Hoekman, Carlo Altomonte, Italo Colantone

Global Value Chains and the Design of Trade Agreements

We explore the role of global value chains (GVCs) in the design of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). We propose a theory that focuses on firms involved in backward and forward GVC activities to identify the main actors pushing for deep trade integration. To address the critical issue of endog...

2023

Rachel Alexander and Aarti Krishnan

Upgrading Trajectories in South Africa: Exploring the Roles of Customer and Supplier Link Types in Manufacturers’ Economic, Social and Environmental Upgrading

This study explores determinants of firms’ economic, social and environmental upgrading and downgrading trajectories in South Africa, with a focus on the manufacturing sector. Specifically, it considers connections between firms’ buyer and supplier relationships and their upgrading outcomes. Dat...

2023

Elisabetta Gentile, Rasmus Lema, Roberta Rabellotti, Dalila Ribaudo

Greening Global Value Chains: A Conceptual Framework for Policy Action

2023

Rasmus Lema and Roberta Rebellotti

The Green and Digital Transition in Manufacturing Global Value Chains in Latecomer Countries

This paper is based on a review of the literature that brings together GVCs, green and digital transformations. Or to be more precise, the analysis is based on three main components: (a) the greening of GVCs and environmental upgrading; (b) the digital transformation of manufacturing GVCs and (c) an...

2023

Christopher Ksoll, Rocco Macchiavello, Ameet Morjaria

Electoral Violence and Supply Chain Disruptions in Kenya’s Floriculture Industry

Violent conflicts, particularly at election times in Africa, are a common cause of instability and economic disruption. This paper studies how firms react to electoral violence using the case of Kenyan flower exporters during the 2008 postelection violence as an example. The violence induced a large...

2023

Bublu Thakur‑Weigold and Sébastien Miroudot

Supply chain myths in the resilience and deglobalization narrative: consequences for policy

The economic disruptions experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have generated a narrative of resilience and deglobalization that brings the old world order into question. Heightened public attention on perceived supply chain failures has exerted pressure on gove...

2023

Sasidaran Gopalan, Sébastien Miroudot, Ketan Reddy

Global value chains and firm survivability during the COVID-19 pandemic: digitalization as the moderator?

Firms participating in global value chains (GVCs) were not only exposed to significant shocks during the COVID-19 pandemic but also turned out to be more resilient. Leveraging a large cross-country firm-level dataset from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) and COVID-19 Follow-Up Enterprise Sur...

2023

Gideon Ndubuisi and Solomon Owusu

Global Value Chains, Job Creation, and Job Destruction among Firms in South Africa

Extant studies suggest that firms’ engagement in global value chain (GVC) trade is associated with productivity gains that result from the continual reallocation of resources to their most productive use. This reallocation generates benefits for transitioning workers but also incurs costs for work...

2023

Stefano Ponte, Jennifer Blair, Mark Dallas

Power and inequality in global value chains: Advancing the research agenda

Power is a central, but largely undertheorized, concept for scholars of global value chains (GVCs). In this introduction to a special issue on power and inequality in GVCs, the authors summarize the key insights from the articles gathered here and explain how the collection advances our understandin...

2023

Christoph Kubitza, Vijesh V. Krishna, Stephan Klasen, Thomas Kopp, Nunung Nuryartono, Matin Qaim

Labor Displacement in Agriculture: Evidence from Oil Palm Expansion in Indonesia

We analyze the labor market effects of oil palm cultivation among smallholder farmers in Indonesia. Oil palm requires less labor per unit of land than alternative crops, especially less female labor. Micro-level data and nationally-representative regency-level data show that oil palm adoption, on av...

2023

Felipe Alexandre De Lima, Stefan Seuring

A Delphi study examining risk and uncertainty management in circular supply chains

Circular supply chains (CSCs) have attracted increasing attention in the supply chain management literature due to their role in increasing the circularity of materials, components, and products. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to risk and uncertainty management in CSCs, with th...

2023

Michele Mancini, Aaditya Mattoo, Daria Taglioni, Debora Winkler

Sub‐Saharan Africa’s participation in global value chains: 1995–2021

This paper examines Sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA) role in global value chains (GVCs) through a new comprehensive country-sector level database. It reaffirms known aspects: SSA's involvement in GVCs has grown but still trails other regions, especially in manufacturing. Typically, SSA is involved in upst...

2023

Emmanuel B. Mensah, Johannes Van Biesebroeck

Intergration of African countries in regional and global value chains: Static and dynamic patterns

We study the geographic concentration of trade flows of African countries using information on the global input–output structure of trade from the Eora database. Most countries show a similar concentration between close-by versus long-distance trade in their foreign input sourcing as in their expo...

2023

Bo Meng, Yu Liu, Yuning Gao, Meng Li, Zhi Wang, Jinjun Xue, Robbie Andrew, Kuishuang Feng, Ye Qi, Yongping Sun, Huaping Sun, Keying Wang

Developing countries’ responsibilities for CO2 emissions in value chains are larger and growing faster than those of developed countries

Carbon emissions associated with international trade are significant. The emergence of complex global value chains (GVCs) in recent decades, in which a country can operate as both a consumer and producer simultaneously, has led to a further rise in emissions. The complexity of these GVCs makes it in...

2023

Guangzheng Jing, Shanshan Meng, Miaojie Yu

Digital economy and the domestic supply chain network

Accelerating the development of the digital economy and building digital industrial clusters with international competitiveness has become an important connotation of China’s high-quality economic development. From the perspective of the digital economy, this paper makes an in-depth study of the i...

2023

Angela Heucher, Amélie Gräfin zu Eulenburg, Judith Ihl, Michèle Kiefer

Global supply chains - especially in the textile sector - face many social and environmental challenges to sustainability. The public has become increasingly aware o f these challenges in the wake of disasters such as the fire in the Ali Enterprises textile factory in Pakistan in 2012 and the co...

2023

Adriana Erthal Abdenur, Maurício Santoro & Maiara Folly

Chinese Railway Investments in Brazil: Socio-Environmental Implications for the Amazon and Cerrado

As China’s interests and presence in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) expand, Chinese firms have been changing their strategy in Brazil. More specifically, they have been diversifying away from buying financial assets toward more greenfield investments, through which China-headquartered compa...

2023

Matthew Alford & Margareet Visser

Governance and Power across Intersecting Value Chains: The Case of South African Apples

A prevailing focus of global value chain (GVC) analysis has been on the dominance of highly consolidated Northern retailers over suppliers in the global South. The rise of regional and domestic value chains (RVCs/DVCs) within the Global South which intersect with GVCs, has been found to involve priv...

2023

Elizabeth Yi Wang, Nigel Driffield, Jeremy Clegg, Lilian Miles, Matthew Alford & Jae Kim

What does it take to build an inclusive governance of global value chains? A framework for intervention

As important actors in global value chains (GVCs), multinational enterprises exercise coordination and control over worldwide commodity, production, service, workforce and knowledge mobility. A level playing field for all GVC stakeholders remains absent. We argue for empowering subordinated stakehol...

2023

Julian Boys, Antonio Andreoni

Upgrading through global, regional or national value chains? Firm-level evidence from the East African textiles & apparel sector

This paper introduces the concept of value chain directionality to investigate how orientation to different value chains has implications for productive learning and industrial outcomes. We develop and test this concept building on a purposefully designed firm-level survey focused on the textile a...

2022

Günther Maihold

Die neue Geopolitik der Lieferketten – “Friend-shoring” als Zielvorgabe für den Umbau von Lieferketten

Eine lange Reihe von Störungen des Welthandels in den letzten Jahren hat eine Reorganisation der internationalen Lieferketten auf die politische Tagesordnung gebracht. Die Unregelmäßigkeiten begannen mit dem Handelskrieg zwischen den USA und China, setzten sich fort mit der Covid-19-Pandemie und ...

2022

Melanie Müller, Christina Saulich, Meike Schulze

Public-Private Alliances for Sustainable Commodity Supply Chains

The promotion of public-private cooperation in resource-rich countries of the Global South can serve as a flanking measure that strengthens the impact of supply chain laws. The case of the South African mining sector in its struggle against Covid-19 shows that close cooperation between companies, th...

2022

Hannes Grohs, Jan Grumiller, Werner Raza

Resilience in Sustainable Global Supply Chains: Evidence and Policy Recommendations

The COVID-19 pandemic-induced lockdowns and export restrictions highlighted the vulnerability of global trade and global value chains (GVCs). What is more, many commentators argue that the likelihood of exogenous shocks that threaten international trade and GVCs, such as natural disasters, pandemics...

2022

GALE RAJ-REICHERT, CORNELIA STARITZ and LEONHARD PLANK

Conceptualizing the Regulator-Buyer State in the European Union for the Exercise of Socially Responsible Public Procurement in Global Production Networks

Labour rights violations and poor working conditions are rife in global production networks (GPNs). Until now research on labour governance in GPNs has been dominated by private measures. We ignite discussions on the role of the state in governing labour conditions in GPNs by focusing on a less well...

2022

Kristoffer Marslev,Cornelia Staritz,and Gale Raj-Reichert

Rethinking Social Upgrading in Global Value Chains: Worker Power, State‒Labour Relations and Intersectionality

This article builds on critiques of the concept of social upgrading in global value chain (GVC) research, which problematize its coupling to lead firm strategies and economic upgrading by supplier firms, by reconceptualizing social upgrading through the lens of worker power. It argues that a better ...

2022

Federico Cammelli, Samuel A. Levy, Janina Grabs, Judson Ferreira Valentim, Rachael D. Garrett

Effectiveness-equity tradeoffs in enforcing exclusionary supply chain policies: Lessons from the Amazonian cattle sector

To address ongoing deforestation for global food commodities production, companies and governments have adopted a range of forest-focused supply chain policies. In the Brazilian Amazon, these policies take the form of market exclusion mechanisms, i.e., immediately dropping suppliers who have cleared...

2022

R.D. Garrett, J. Grabs, F. Cammelli, F. Gollnow, S.A. Levy

Should payments for environmental services be used to implement zero-deforestation supply chain policies? The case of soy in the Brazilian Cerrado

Over the past decade public and private actors have been developing a variety of new policy approaches for addressing agriculturally-driven deforestation linked to international supply chains. While payments for environmental services (PES) have been advocated in many contexts as an efficient and pr...

2022

Sustainable Global Supply Chains Report 2022

Global supply chains affect the economy, the environment and social welfare in many ways. Worldwide, economies are experiencing global supply shortages today, affecting key industries such as automotive and consumer electronics as well as vaccine and medical supplies industries. These preoccupy poli...

2022

Jörg Hofstetter, Anita McGahan, Brian Silverman, Baniyelme Zoogah

A Unique Diversity: Understanding the sustainability and global integration of African businesses

Diamond rings, chocolate delights, coffee, cars and portable electronics are all integrally grounded in the African continent, however Africa’s vital contributions have not been fully integrated into scholarly understanding of supply or value chains....

2022

Joerg S. Hofstetter, Anita M. McGahan, Brian S. Silverman, Baniyelme D. Zoogah

Sustainability and global value chains in Africa: Introduction to the Special Issue

The challenges and opportunities facing African organizations reflect a long history of tensions, tragedies, triumphs, and accomplishments in relationships across continental boundaries. For example, Africa has long been a source of critical minerals and other raw materials that are integral to a wi...

2022

Bettina Rudloff

Sustainable international value chains: The EU’s new due diligence approach as part of a policy mix

A new family of regulatory approaches affecting international value chains has been initiated recently, mainly by developed countries, the Due Diligence Laws (DDLs). These new approaches are an addition to already existing (and partially) older trade measures that have already been adapted in the pa...

2022

Günther Maihold

Die neue Geopolitik der Lieferketten – “Friend-shoring” als Zielvorgabe für den Umbau von Lieferketten

Eine lange Reihe von Störungen des Welthandels in den letzten Jahren hat eine Reorganisation der internationalen Lieferketten auf die politische Tagesordnung gebracht. Die Unregelmäßigkeiten begannen mit dem Handelskrieg zwischen den USA und China, setzten sich fort mit der Covid-19-Pandemie und ...

2022

Philip Schleifer, Clara Brandi, Rupal Verma, Katharina Bissinger, Matteo Fiorini

Voluntary standards and the SDGs: Mapping public-private complementarities for sustainable development

To strengthen global sustainability governance, academics and policymakers have called for a better integration of private governance with public policy instruments. Surprisingly, however, systematic research on the state of such public-private complementarities in the field of sustainable developme...

2022

Philip Schleifer and Luc Fransen

Towards a Smart Mix 2.0 – Harnessing Regulatory Heterogeneity for Sustainable Global Supply Chains

Over the past three decades, efforts to address human rights and environmental risks in global supply chains have spurred a plethora of industry self-regulation, third-party certification schemes, voluntary due diligence guidelines, and mandatory supply chain regulations. The resulting heterogeneity...

2022

Antonio Andreoni and Simon Roberts

Geopolitics Of Critical Minerals In Renewable Energy Supply Chains

Addressing the climate change crisis calls for an accelerated deployment of renewableenergy technologies – solar panels and wind turbines – as well as a shift towards electric vehicles (EV) (Bainton et al., 2021). The manufacturing of these technologies, however, relies on the availability and s...

2022

Inga Carry, Günther Maihold

Illegal logging, timber laundering and the global illegal timber trade

Deforestation claims an estimated 10 million hectares each year (FAO 2020). Today’s global demand for timber products1 simply cannot be met by legal, sustainable forestry anymore. The competition for cheap wood products on the global timber market has become a major driver of i...

2022

Mehmet Sait Akman, Fabrizio Botti, Clara Brandi, Michael Brüntrup, Markus Dietrich, Ilaria Espa, Andreas Freytag, Robert Koopman, Stormy-Annika Mildner, Bettina Rudloff

Sustainable and resilient agricultural value chains: Addressing multiple vulnerabilities with a new partnership approach

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine meet longer-term impacts of climate change and no-less pressing challenges of social and environmental sustainability in and around agriculture, food and nutrition security. Many international mechanisms are already in place for agriculture and f...

2022

Christoph Scherrer

Embeddedness of Power Relations in Global Value Chains

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on power relations in global sourcing which goes beyond the prevalent focus on the dyadic business-to-business relation. The move through the various theories of power leads to my major claim which is that power dynamics in GVCs must be understood ...

2022

Maria C. Lo Bue, Tu Thi Ngoc Le, Manuel Santos Silva, Kunal Sen

Gender and vulnerable employment in the developing world: Evidence from global microdata

This paper investigates gender inequality in vulnerable employment: forms of employment typically featuring high precariousness, inadequate earnings, and lack of decent working conditions. Using a large collection of harmonized household surveys from developing countries, we measure long-term trends...

2022

Ben Shepherd

Modelling global value chains: From trade costs to policy impacts

I use an approach from the family of ‘new quantitative trade models’ to explore the links between trade costs and integration in Global Value Chains (GVCs). The model conceptualises GVC trade through a multi-country, multi-sector Ricardian model that nests the standard structural gravity model. ...

2022

Maria-Therese Gustafsson, Jorge E. Rodriguez-Morales, Lisa M. Dellmuth

Private adaptation to climate risks: Evidence from the world’s largest mining companies

Private companies have in recent years started to disclose information about their exposure and responses to climate risks. However, we still know little about how and why private actors engage in climate change adaptation, and to what extent they do so in ways that improve societal resilience. This...

2022

Raphael Kaplinsky and Erika Kraemer-Mbula

Innovation and uneven development: The challenge for low- and middle-income economies

This essay begins with a recounting of the rise of the Mass Production techno-economic paradigm and the emergence of the systemic economic crisis in the early 1970s. It then explains how this crisis was stemmed by the deepening of globalisation, which accelerated during the 1980s. However, shortly b...

2022

Pamina Koenig and Sandra Poncet

The effects of the Rana Plaza collapse on the sourcing choices of French importers

This paper analyzes the effects of a major reputational shock affecting textile importers from Bangladesh. The collapse of the Rana Plaza building in April 2013 generated a surge of activism and media coverage specifically targeting the firms that sourced from the factories affected by the disaster....

2022

Yuwan Duan, Erik Dietzenbacher, Bart Los, Ruochen Dai

Regional Inequality in China During its Rise as a Giant Exporter: A Value Chain Analysis

China's exports success has implications for regional income inequality, because most of its export products are manufactured in the coastal zone. We propose a value chain–based accounting framework to quantify the contributions of exports to regional income inequality. We employ newly developed i...

2022

Rachael Diprose, Nanang Kurniawan, Kate Macdonald, Poppy Winanti

Regulating sustainable minerals in electronics supplychains: local power struggles and the ‘hidden costs’ of global tin supply chain governance

Voluntary supply chain regulation has proliferated in recent decades in response toconcerns about the social and environmental impacts of global production and trade.Yet the capacity of supply chain regulation to influence production practices on theground has been persistently questioned. Through e...

2022

Stefan Pahl, Marcel P. Timmer, Reitze Gouma, Pieter J. Woltjer

Jobs and Productivity Growth in Global Value Chains: New Evidence for Twenty-five Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Using newly developed data, the evolution of job and productivity growth in global value chains (GVCs) is analyzed for 25 low- and middle-income countries. GVC jobs are found to be more productive than non-GVC jobs. Their share in the total labor force is small, in particular for low-income countrie...

2022

Juliane Lang, Stefano Ponte, Thando Vilakazi

Linking power and inequality in global value chains

There is increasing interest in the study of globalization on whether the emergence and consolidation of global value chains (GVCs) have exacerbated inequalities within and across nations and/or how GVCs may be leveraged to mitigate them. Although power asymmetries have been identified as a central ...

2022

Jan Grumiller, Hannes Grohs, Werner Raza

Reconciling Efficiency, Resilience and Sustainability: Global Value Chains in a Post-Covid-19 World

In this article, we aim at making both a conceptual as well as a policy contribution to this debate. In sections 2 and 3, the interlinkages and trade-offs between GVC effi- ciency, resilience and sustainability will be explored and a conceptual framework be introduced that provides a sys- temic way ...

2022

Cornelia Staritz, Bernhard Tröster, Jan Grumiller, Felix Maile

Price‑Setting Power in Global Value Chains: The Cases of Price Stabilisation in the Cocoa Sectors in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana

This paper calls for integrating price-setting power and related uneven exposure to price risks into the analysis of governance in global value chains (GVCs) as it adds to other power dimensions in producing unequal distributional outcomes. This is shown for the cocoa GVC, in which—unlike in toda...

2022

Peter J. Buckley, Roger Strange, Marcel P. Timmer, Gaaitzen J. de Vries

Rent appropriation in global value chains: The past, present, and future of intangible assets

The argument of this article is that global strategy research should devote greater attention to rent appropriation in global value chains (GVCs). We discuss the concept of intangible assets, emphasize their scalability at low marginal cost and highlight strategies for the appropriation of rents fro...

2022

Ari Van Assche, Rajneesh Narula

Internalization strikes back? Global value chains, and the rising costs of efective cascading compliance

Strategies that make quasi-internalization feasible such as cascading compliance provide a means for lead firms to control the social and environmental conditions among their suppliers and sub-suppliers in ways other than through equity ownership. We take an internalization theory lens to reflect on...

2022

Laura M.G. Hidalgo, Rosane N. de Faria, Roberta Souza Piao, Christine Wieck

Multiplicity of sustainability standards and potential trade costs in the palm oil industry

The growing impact of the global production of agricultural commodities has created new regulations that aim at a more sustainable trade. Sustainability standards (SS) are essential tools for transnational trade governance because they increase the possibility of recognizing products from sustainabl...

2022

Burcu Gözet, Henning Wilts

The circular economy as a new narrative for the textile industry: an analysis of the textile value chain with a focus on Germany’s transformation to a circular economy

At the end of March 2022, the European Commission published its new EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles. Its ambitious vision is to reduce textile waste, promote circular measures and minimise the negative environmental impacts of the textile industry. But what would a textile industry...

2022

Kailan Tian, Yu Zhang, Yuze Li, Xi Ming, Shangrong Jiang, Hongbo Duan, Cuihong Yang, Shouyang Wang

Regional trade agreement burdens global carbon emissions mitigation

Regional trade agreements (RTAs) have been widely adopted to facilitate international trade and cross-border investment and promote economic development. However, ex ante measurements of the environmental effects of RTAs to date have not been well conducted. Here, we estimate the CO2 emissions burde...

2021

Gideon Ndubuisi, Solomon Owusu

How important is GVC Participation to Export Upgrading

Abstract Exporting higher‐quality and complex products are deemed pathways to economic growth and development. However, producing such products are knowledge‐intensive and require quality intermediate inputs and advanced technologies. Integration into global trade networks is increasingly argue...

2021

Stefan Pahl, Clara Brandi, Jakob Schwab, Frederik Stender

Cling together, swing together: the contagious effects of COVID‐19 on developing countries through global value chains

This paper aims at estimating the economic vulnerability of developing countries to disruptions in global value chains (GVCs) due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. It uses trade in value added data for a sample of 12 developing countries in sub‐Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America to assess their depe...

2021

Eddy Bekkers, Robert B. Koopman, Carolina Lemos Rêgo

Structural change in the Chinese economy and changing trade relations with the world

This paper examines the impact of structural change in China, in particular a reduction in the savings rate, an increase in the share of skilled workers, and an increase in productivity in technologically advanced manufacturing sectors targeted by Made in China 2025. Baseline projections until 2040 ...

2021

Günther Maihold.; Viktoria Reisch

Environmental Rights and Conflicts over Raw Materials in Latin America. The Escazú Agreement Is Ready to Come into Force in 2021

On 5 November 2020 Mexico ratified the so-called Escazú Agreement, a treaty between Latin American and Caribbean states on establishing regional transparency and en­viron­­ment standards, as the eleventh country to do so. The prescribed quorum of ratifications has thus been attained, and the agr...

2021

Laurie S.M. Reijnders, Marcel P.Timmer, Xianjia Ye

Labour demand in global value chains: Is there a bias against unskilled work?

Rodrik (2018) hypothesizes that technology used in global value chains (GVCs) is biased against the use of unskilled workers. To test this hypothesis, we introduce a GVC production function in which final output is produced by means of factor inputs from all countries that participate in the GVC. In...

2021

Wen Chen, Bart Los, Marcel Timmer

Factor incomes in global value chains: The role of intangibles.

Recent studies document a decline in the share of labour and a simultaneous increase in the share of residual (‘factorless’) income in national GDP. We argue the need for study of factor incomes in cross-border production to complement country studies. We define a GVC production function that tr...

2021

Chuan Liao, Kerstin Nolte, Jonathan A. Sullivan, Daniel G. Brown, Jann Lay, Christof Althoff, Arun Agrawal

Carbon emissions from the global land rush and potential mitigation

Global drivers and carbon emissions associated with large-scale land transactions have been poorly investigated. Here we examine major factors behind such transactions (income, agricultural productivity, availability of arable land and water scarcity) and estimate potential carbon emissions under di...

2021

Cajal-Grossi, J, Macchiavello, R, Noguera, G.

Buyers’ Sourcing Strategies and Suppliers’ Markups in Bangladeshi Garments

Do suppliers' margins in global value chains depend on buyers' approach to sourcing? We distinguish between international buyers adopting relational versus spot sourcing strategies in the Bangladeshi garment sector. Our data allow us to match inputs used by exporters to produce specific orders for d...

2021

Karishma Banga

Digital Technologies and Product Upgrading in Global Value Chains: Empirical Evidence from Indian Manufacturing Firms

This paper provides empirical evidence on the impact of digitalisation on product upgrading in Global Value Chains (GVCs). Analysis is done for a sample of Indian manufacturing GVC firms in the period 2001–2015 from the firm-level database Prowess, using the methodology of System Generalised Metho...

2021

Karishma Banga, Mohamed Gharib, Maximiliano Mendez-Parra, Jamie Macleod

E-commerce in preferential trade agreements: implications for African firms and the AfCFTA

At continent level, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) negotiations are scheduled to include a protocol on e-commerce under Phase III, presenting a unique opportunity for African countries to collectively establish common positions on e-commerce, harmonise digital economy regulations a...

2021

Searching for Trade Partners in Developing Countries

An integral part of global supply chains is the selection by international buyers of trading partners in developing countries. However, our understanding of how buyers find a suitable long term supplier is limited. I use unique buyer-seller customs data to directly observe experimentation activity i...

2021

Anne Mette Kjær, Ole Therkildsen, Lars Buur, Michael Wendelboe Hansen

When ‘Pockets of effectiveness’ matter politically: Extractive industry regulation and taxation in Uganda and Tanzania

It is a common view that states in the developing world with substantial extractive natural resource discoveries may not have the capacity to tax and regulate multinational companies in the sector. In this article, we show that ruling elites in recently resource-rich Tanzania, and in Uganda – expe...

2021

Günther Maihold.; Melanie Müller.; Christina Saulich.; Svenja Schöneich

Responsibility in Supply Chains – Germany’s Due Diligence Act Is a Good Start

On 3 March, the Federal Cabinet adopted an act on corporate due diligence in supply chains. This represents an important step towards German businesses assuming full and proper responsibility for the supply chains associated with their goods and services. The move puts Germany in a group of European...

2021

Larissa Rodrigues, Felipe Bastos, Radolfo Finatti, Marta Salomon

What is the real socioeconomic impact of gold and diamond exploration in the Amazon?

Gold and diamond mining in the Amazon has become a major debate topic in recent years, and has intensified during the term of the current federal administration, alongside the issues of increased deforestation and armed conflict over land use. The question remains: does mineral exploration actually ...

2021

Björn Ambos, Kristin Brandl, Alessandra Perri, Vittoria G. Scalera, Ari Van Assche

The nature of innovation in global value chains

Global value chains (GVCs) have revolutionized production processes and many companies no longer produce goods and services entirely in one single country or within their own organizational boundaries. Through offshoring and outsourcing, value chains are sliced up and activities are dispersed to loc...

2021

Larissa Rodrigues, Felipe Bastos, Radolfo Finatti, Marta Salomon

Protected areas or threatened areas? The endless gold rush in the Indigenous Lands and Conservation Units of the Amazon

This study features updated data until 2020 on the size of the threat that gold poses to protected areas in the Legal Amazon. To accomplish this, the study analyzed all gold prospecting requests (prospecting applications and permits) registered with the National Mining Agency (Agência Nacional de M...

2021

Almut Schilling-Vacaflor, Andrea Lenschow, Edward Challies, Benedetta Cotta, Jens Newig

Contextualizing certification and auditing: Soy certification and access of local communities to land and water in Brazil

The massive expansion of soy production in Brazil has contributed to a loss of access for local communities to land and water, particularly in highly dynamic frontier regions in the Cerrado. Soy certification standards like the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) contain principles that are suppose...

2021

Almut Schilling‐Vacaflor, Andrea Lenschow

Hardening foreign corporate accountability through mandatory due diligence in the European Union? New trends and persisting challenges

The negative externalities of global commodity chains and existing governance gaps have received wide scholarly attention. Indeed, many sectors including forest-risk commodities (FRCs) like soy and beef from Brazil remain largely unregulated. This article analyzes ongoing policy-making processes at ...

2021

Carolin Brix‐Asala, Stefan Seuring, Philipp C. Sauer, Axel Zehendner, Lara Schilling

Resolving the base of the pyramid inclusion paradox through supplier development

Resulting from divergent business environments between actors, the integration of the base of the pyramid (BoP) into formal supply chain (SC) structures is often ham- pered by institutional voids, which can result in the emergence of paradoxical situa- tions. This paper analyzes the potential of sup...

2021

Davin Chor, Kalina Manova, Zhihong Yu

Growing like China: Firm performance and global production line position

Global value chains have fundamentally transformed international trade and development in recent decades. We use matched firm-level customs and manufacturing survey data, together with Input-Output tables for China, to examine how Chinese firms position themselves in global production lines and how ...

2021

Alvaro Espitia, Aaditya Mattoo, Nadia Rocha, Michele Ruta, Deborah Winkler

Pandemic trade: COVID‐19, remote work and global value chains

This paper studies the trade effects of COVID-19 using monthly disaggregated trade data for 28 countries and multiple trading partners from the beginning of the pandemic to June 2020. Regression results based on a sector-level gravity model show that the negative trade effects induced by COVID-19 sh...

2021

Marcel P. Timmer, Stefan Pahl

Structural Change in Exports: from product to functional specialization

Trade analysis on the basis of countries’ export baskets can be misleading when production is globally fragmented. The chapter argues for a switch to analysis of the type of activities that are embodied in exports. The chapter discusses two steps towards this goal. It first discusses the transit...

2021

Sanchita Banerjee Saxena, Nancy Reyes Mullins, Salil Tripathi

The Weakest Link in the Global Supply Chain – How the Pandemic is Affecting Bangladesh’s Garment Workers

The readymade garment industry employs millions of workers in Bangladesh and has contributed to the nation's development. The COVID19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the sector as malls and factories had to close and workers faced uncertain futures. This report evaluates global retailers...

2021

Christine Wieck and Jason H. Grant

Codex in Motion: Food Safety Standard Setting and Impacts on Developing Countries.

The Codex Alimentarius, or ‘food code’, was established to set international standards to ensure the safety and quality of food and agricultural products while at the same time creating a level playing field for international trade. However, less is known about the duration of the standards sett...

2021

Wieck, C., Dries, L., Martinez-Gomez, V., Idowu Kareem, O., Rudloff, B., Gaetano Santeramo, F., Sliwinska, M., and Sliwinska, R.

European and member states policy responses and economic impacts on agri-food markets due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

2021

Emily J. Blanchard, Chad P. Bown, Robert C. Johnson

Global Value Chains and Trade Policy

How do global value chain (GVC) linkages modify countries’ incentives to imposeimport protection? Are these linkages empirically important determinants of tradepolicy in practice? To address these questions, we develop a new approach to mod-eling tariff setting with GVCs, in which opti...

2021

Julia Schwarzkopf, Klaus Fischer, Martin Müller

Success factors of voluntary sustainable supply chain management sector initiatives

Sustainability can create greater efficiency and cost savings in the supply chain. Supply chains, which are more complex and global than ever before, are full of both risks and opportunities. The risks range from inconsistent or poor quality to supply disruptions to health and safety concerns to cor...

2021

Sanchita Banerjee Saxena, Harpreet Kaur, Salil Tripathi

How the Pandemic has Impacted the Various Layers of the Global Garment Supply Chain

This timely collection brings together original explorations of the COVID-19 pandemic and its wide-ranging, global effects on human rights. The contributors argue that a human rights perspective is necessary to understand the pervasive consequences of the crisis, while focusing attention on those...

2021

Holger Görg, Jann Lay, Stefan Pahl, Adnan Seric, Frauke Steglich, Liubov Yaroshenko

Multilateral coordination and exchange for sustainable global value chains

While participation in global value chains (GVCs) is widely associated with benefits for countries’ development and growth, its environmental and social costs become increasingly evident. Representing core buyer and supplier countries in GVCs, the G20 is particularly suited to tackle this global c...

2021

Julian Donaubauer, Peter Kannen, Frauke Steglich

Foreign Direct Investment & Petty Corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Empirical Analysis at the Local Level

Inspired by a recent and ongoing debate about whether foreign direct investment (FDI) represents a blessing for or an impediment to economic, social, and political development in FDI host countries this paper addresses two issues: Does the presence of foreign investors impact the occurrence of petty...

2021

Ana Margarida Fernandes, Hiau Looi Kee, Deborah Winkler

Determinants of Global Value Chain Participation: Cross-Country Evidence

The past decades have witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains (GVCs). Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of countries’ GVC partic...

2021

Almut Schilling-Vacaflor

Integrating Human Rights and the Environment in Supply Chain Regulations

To address the negative externalities associated with global trade, countries in the Global North have increasingly adopted supply chain regulations. While global supply chains cause or contribute to interconnected environmental and human rights impacts, I show that supply chain regulations often ex...

2021

Peter Kannen, Finn Ole Semrau, Frauke Steglich

Green gifts from abroad? FDI and firms’ green management

Improvements of firms' environmental performance crucially determine the speed of a country's green economic transformation. In this paper, we investigate whether firms with foreign ownership are more likely to adopt 'green' management practices, which determine the capability to monitor and improve...

2021

Giovanni Pasquali, Aarti Krishnan, Matthew Alford

Multichain strategies and economic upgrading in global value chains: Evidence from Kenyan horticulture

An extensive body of research has examined the prospects for suppliers in the global South to upgrade within global value chains (GVCs) controlled by lead firms from, and oriented towards end-markets in, the global North. However, the expansion of South-South trade has altered the geography of GVCs....

2021

Giovanni Pasquali, Matthew Alford

Global value chains, private governance and multiple end-markets: insights from Kenyan leather

This article analyses how the private governance of global value chains (GVCs) varies across multiple end-markets. This is explored through a two-stage mixed-methods analysis of Kenya’s participation in leather value chains serving Europe, China, India and the COMESA region. We first draw on trans...

2021

Valentina De Marchi, Matthew Alford

State policies and upgrading in global value chains: A systematic literature review

This paper examines the role of state policymaking in a context of global value chains (GVCs). While the literature acknowledges that states matter in GVCs, there is little understanding of how they matter from a policy perspective. We address this tension between theory and practice by first deline...

2021

Matthew Alford, Margareet Visser, Stephanie Barrientos

Southern actors and the governance of labour standards in global production networks: The case of South African fruit and wine

Recent studies highlight the emergence of standards, including multi-stakeholder initiatives developed and applied within the global South where supplier firms are usually based. This trend has created a complex ethical terrain whereby transnational standards flow through global production networks ...

2021

Philipp Herkenhoff, Sebastian Krautheim, Finn Ole Semrau, Frauke Steglich

Corporate Social Responsibility along the Global Value Chain

Firms are under increasing pressure to meet stakeholders’ demand for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) along their global value chains. We study the incentives for and investments in CSR at different stages of the production process. We analyze a model of sequential production with incomplete ...

2021

Katharina Löhr, Bujar Aruqaj, Daniel Baumert, Michelle Bonatti, Michael Brüntrup, Christian Bunn, Augusto Castro-Nunez, Giovanna Chavez-Miguel, Martha Lilia Del Rio, Samyra Hachmann, Héctor Camilo Morales Muñoz, Franziska Ollendorf, Tatiana Rodriguez, Bettina Rudloff, Johannes Schorling, Arne Schuffenhauer, Ingrid Schulte, Stefan Sieber, Sophia Tadesse, Christian Ulrichs, Claudia Vogel and Michael Weinhardt

Social Cohesion as the Missing Link between Natural Resource Management and Peacebuilding: Lessons from Cocoa Production in Côte d’Ivoire and Colombia

Social cohesion plays a key role in processes of peacebuilding and sustainable development. Fostering social cohesion might present a potential to enhance the connection of natural resource management and peacebuilding and better functioning of sustainable land use systems. This contribution explore...

2021

Bettina Rudloff

Supply chain legislation: “The EU’s general principle is to support, not to punish

2021

Rachael D Garrett, Samuel A Levy, Florian Gollnow, Leonie Hodel, Ximena Rueda

Have food supply chain policies improved forest conservation and rural livelihoods? A systematic review

To address concerns about the negative impacts of food supply chains in forest regions, a growing number of companies have adopted policies to influence their suppliers’ behaviors. With a focus on forest-risk food supply chains, we provide a systematic review of the conservation and livelihood out...

2021

Janina Grabs, Federico Cammelli, Samuel A. Levy, Rachael D. Garrett

Desgning effective and equitable zero-deforestation supply chain policies

In response to the clearing of tropical forests for agricultural expansion, agri-food companies have adopted promises to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains in the form of ‘zero-deforestation commitments’ (ZDCs). While there is growing evidence about the environmental effectiveness ...

2021

Antonio Andreoni, Pamela Mondliwa, Simon Roberts, and Fiona Tregenna

Structural Transformation in South Africa The Challenges of Inclusive Industrial Development in a Middle-Income Country

Taking South Africa as an important case study of the challenges of structural transformation, Structural Transformation in South Africa offers a new micro-meso level framework and evidence linking country-specific and global dynamics of change, with a focus on the current challenges and opportuniti...

2021

Luc Fransen, Kendra Dupuy, Marja Hinfelaar, Sultan Mohammed Zakaria Mazumder

Tempering Transnational Advocacy? The Effect of Repression and Regulatory Restriction on Transnational NGO Collaborations

This paper examines through qualitative study the effect of government regulatory restriction and repression on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engaging in transnational advocacy. The focus is on NGO’s advocacy activities, in the realm of human rights, environment, labor and development in p...

2021

Justin Barnes, Anthony Black, Chelsea Markowitz, Lorenza Monaco

Regional integration, regional value chains and the automotive industry in Sub-Saharan Africa

To date, regional automotive value chains have not developed to any significant extent in Africa. Growing demand for vehicles across the continent, closer economic integration and the desire on the part of some larger African countries to establish an automotive industry have improved prospects. But...

2021

Mike Morris, Justin Barnes, David Kaplan

Value chains and industrial development in South Africa

This paper focuses on the dynamics of global value chains (GVC) engagement and industrial development in South Africa through two case studies - the automotive and textiles/apparel sectors. The further industrialisation and development of South Africa and of the Southern African region will depend...

2021

Justin Barnes, Anthony Black, Lorenza Monaco

Government Policy in Multinational-Dominated Global Value Chains

Through a series of government plans, the South African automotive industry has achieved undeniable success, especially in terms of its export orientation. The industry uses efficient technologies and is integrated into global markets. However, major structural weaknesses exist. Export growth has no...

2021

Thomas Reardon, Lenis Saweda O Liverpool-Tasie, Bart Minten

Quiet Revolution by SMEs in the midstream of value chains in developing regions: wholesale markets, wholesalers, logistics, and processing

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the midstream (processors, wholesalers and wholesale markets, and logistics) segments of transforming value chains have proliferated rapidly over the past several decades in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Their spread has been most rapid in the long transitio...

2021

Antonio Savoia, Kunal Sen

The political economy of the resource curse: A development perspective

This article reviews the recent literature on the developmental effects of resource abundance, assessing likely effects and channels with respect to key development outcomes. To date, this area has received less analysis, al though it is relevant to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goa...

2021

Philipp Harms, Jaewon Jung, Oliver Lorz

Offshoring and sequential productionchains: A general equilibrium analysis

We present a two-region general equilibrium model in which firms exploit international wage differences by offshoring parts of the production process. Firms have to take into account that production steps follow a strict sequence and that transporting intermediate goods across borders is costly. We ...

2021

Mauro Boffa, Marion Jansen, Olga Solleder

Participating to Compete: Do Small Firms in Developing Countries Benefit from Global Value Chains?

Standard trade theory suggests that the profile of exporting firms is characterized by large firms which dominate domestic productivity distribution. Large manufacturing multinationals have increased their productivity by participating, creating and shaping global production networks. In recent d...

2021

Pamina Koenig, Sebastian Krautheim, Claudius Löhnert, Thierry Verdier

Local global watchdogs: Trade, sourcing and the internationalization of social activism

International NGO campaigns criticizing firms for infringements along their internationalized value chains are a salient feature of economic globalization. We argue that understanding the international patterns of NGO campaigns requires accounting for the geography of their targets’ economic activ...

2021

Marc Bacchetta, Eddy Bekkers, Roberta Piermartini, Stela Rubinova, Voctor Stolzenburg, Ankai Xu

COVID-19 and global value chains: A discussion of arguments on value chain organization and the role of the WTO

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a discussion among researchers and policy makers about changes to global value chains, both about expected changes and changes that should be promoted by government policies. In this paper we conduct an in-depth analysis of the reasons for ...

2020

Peter J. Buckley, Roger Strange, Marcel P. Timmer, Gaaitzen J. de Vries

Catching-up in the global factory: Analysis and policy implications

MNEs shape the location of activities in the world economy, linking diverse regions in what has been called the global factory. This study portrays the evolution of incomes and employment in the global factory using a quantitative input–output approach. We find emerging economies forging ahead rel...

2020

Lenis Saweda O. Liverpool-Tasie, Ayala Wineman, Sarah Young, Justice Tambo, Carolina Vargas, Thomas Reardon, Guigonan Serge Adjognon, Jaron Porciello, Nasra Gathoni, Livia Bizikova, Alessandra Galiè & Ashley Celestin

A scoping review of market links between value chain actors and small-scale producers in developing regions

Sustainable Development Goal 2 aims to end hunger, achieve food and nutrition security and promote sustainable agriculture by 2030. This requires that small-scale producers be included in, and benefit from, the rapid growth and transformation under way in food systems. Small-scale producers interact...

2020

Michael Dolislager, Thomas Reardon, Aslihan Arslan, Louise Fox, Saweda Liverpool-Tasie, Christine Sauer, David L. Tschirley

Youth and Adult Agrifood System Employment in Developing Regions: Rural (Peri-urban to Hinterland) vs. Urban

Using a unique dataset covering 178,794 households with 460,654 individuals spanning Africa, Asia, and Latin America, we explore employment of youths across rural zones (peri-urban, intermediate, hinterland) and urban areas. Using full-time equivalents (FTEs), we compare own-farming versus farm-wage...

2020

Joachim C. F. Ehrenthal, Thomas W. Gruen, Joerg S. Hofstetter

Recommendations for Conducting Service-Dominant Logic Research

In the digital age, companies compete on how well their service meets customer needs and solves customer problems, interacting with ever more actors to fulfill their promise. A well-suited mid-range theory to conduct research in this “new” world is service-dominant (S-D) logic. However, there ar...

2020

Lenis Saweda O Liverpool‐Tasie, Charuta M. Parkhi

Climate Risk and Technology Adoption in the Midstream of Crop Value Chains: Evidence from Nigerian Maize Traders

Climate induced events exacerbate food production and distribution risks, posing a threat to global food security. Though many studies focus on farmer adaptation to climate change, there are few studies of actors in the middle of agricultural value chains such as traders, logistics providers, and pr...

2020

Joachim von Braun

Climate Change Risks for Agriculture, Health, and Nutrition

The stability of global, national, and local food systems is at risk under climate change. Climate change affects food production, availability of and access to food, food quality, food safety, diet quality, and thus people’s nutrition and health. Climate change may further slow progress towards a...

2020

von Braun, J., N. Gerber, V. Abresch

Social Change and Policies driving the transformation of consumption in the Food Systems

2020

Anna Pegels, Tilman Altenburg

Latecomer development in a “greening” world: Introduction to the Special Issue

2020

Altenburg Tilman, Xiao Chen, Wilfried Lütkenhorst, Cornelia Staritz, Lindsay Whitfield

Exporting out of China or out of Africa? Automation versus relocation in the global clothing industry

This Discussion Paper examines the opportunities that the rising industrial wages in China will bring for Africa. China has been the industrial workbench of the global economy for decades. However, its competitive advantages are waning, particularly for labour-intensive assembly activities in the cl...

2020

Clara Brandi, Jakob Schwab, Axel Berger, Jean-Frédéric Morin

Do environmental provisions in trade agreements make exports from developing countries greener?

Environmental provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are increasing in terms of their number and variety. The economic effects of these environmental provisions remain largely unclear. It is, therefore, necessary to determine whether the trend to incorporate environmental provisions in P...

2020

Clara Brandi

The Interaction of Private and Public Governance: The Case of Sustainability Standards for Palm Oil

By providing insights into the interaction between private-driven and public-driven governance initiatives in the context of the “Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil” (RSPO) and the “Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil” (ISPO), this article sheds new light the interaction between private and publ...

2020

Bissinger, Katharina, Clara Brandi, Sandra Cabrera de Leicht, Matteo Fiorini, Schleifer Schleifer, Santiago Fernandez de Cordova, Niematallah Ahmed

Linking Voluntary Standards to Sustainable Development Goals

With the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations has called on the private sector to contribute more to achieving the sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This report helps decision makers in the public and private sectors to understand where voluntary sustainability standards a...

2020

Xiaolan Fu

Digital Transformation of Global Value Chains and Sustainable Post-Pandemic Recovery

This perspective paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global production and trade from the perspective of global value chains. Particular attention is paid to the transmission mechanisms and the role of digital technology in sustainable post-pandemic economic recovery. It argues tha...

2020

Weiß, Daniel, Garcia Bibiana

Respect for Human Rights in Global Value Chains: Risks and Opportunities for German Industries.

The German Federal Government adopted the National Action Plan for Business and Human Rights (NAP) in 2016. This plan lays down German companies’ responsibility to respect human rights. In addition, it provides for a bundle of measures to assist companies with implementing and organ­ising their d...

2020

Aslihan Arslan, David E. Tschirley, Eva-Maria Egger

Rural Youth Welfare along the Rural-urban Gradient: An Empirical Analysis across the Developing World

We use survey data on 170,000 households from Asia, Latin America and Africa, global geo-spatial data, and an economic geography framework to highlight five findings about rural youth in developing countries. First, the youth share in population is falling rapidly, and youth numbers are stable or fa...

2020

Joseph Goeb, Andrew Dillon, Frank Lupi, David Tschirley

Pesticides: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Agricultural intensification can negatively affect farmer and social welfare through health and environmental externalities if producers have imperfect knowledge of the risks posed by agricultural inputs. This paper explores the effects of health-risk information on the demand for substitutes in the...

2020

Fabio Landini, Rasmus Lema, Franco Malerba

Demand-led catch-up: a history-friendly model of latecomer development in the global green economy

This article examines the role played by demand in catching up and in leadership changes in green industries, motivated by the belief that demand-led catch-up is a prevalent pathway in such industries. The article first examines stylized cases of sectoral green catch-up by China in which the local m...

2020

M. Kaplan, D. Busemann, K. Wirtgen

Trilateral Cooperation in German Development Cooperation

2020

Nicole Helmerich, Gale Raj-Reichert, Sabrina Zajak

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

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 ...

2020

Gale Raj-Reichert, Helena Gräf

Socially responsible public procurement by the city and districts of Berlin: protecting workers in global supply chains

Workers in factories of global supply chains in the global South producing goods governments purchase often face poor working conditions. A governance tool to improve the situation is socially responsible public procurement. We assess this potential vis-à-vis the newly revised public procurement la...

2020

Makaiko G. Khonje, Olivier Ecker, Matin Qaim

Effects of Modern Food Retailers on Adult and Child Diets and Nutrition

In many developing countries, food environments are changing rapidly, with modern retailers—such as supermarkets—gaining in importance. Previous studies have suggested that the rise of modern retailers contributes to overweight and obesity. Effects of modern retailers on dietary quality have not...

2020

Chandra S.R. Nuthalapati, Rajib Sutradhar, Thomas Reardon, Matin Qaim

Supermarket procurement and farmgate prices in India

Supermarkets have gained in importance in the food systems of many developing countries, with profound implications for smallholder farmers. Several studies analyzed effects of selling to supermarkets on smallholder productivity and income. However, no previous work systematically analyzed effects o...

2020

Bethelhem Legesse Debela, Esther Gehrke, Matin Qaim

Links between Maternal Employment and Child Nutrition in Rural Tanzania

Improving child nutrition and empowering women are two important and closely connected development goals. Fostering female employment is often seen as an avenue to serve both these goals, especially if it helps to empower the mothers of undernourished children. However, maternal employment can influ...

2020

Juliano Correa, Elías Cisneros, Jan Börner, Alexander Pfaff, Marcelo Costa, Raoni Rajão

Evaluating REDD+ at subnational level: Amazon fund impacts in Alta Floresta, Brazil

The Amazon Fund is the world's largest program to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), funded with over US $1b donated by Norway and Germany between 2008 and 2017 to reward Brazil for prior deforestation reductions. Olhos D'Água da Amazônia is cited as a leading proj...

2020

Neus Escobar, E. Jorge Tizado, Erasmus K.H.J. zu Ermgassen, Pernilla Löfgren, Jan Börner, Javier Godar

Spatially-explicit footprints of agricultural commodities: Mapping carbon emissions embodied in Brazil’s soy exports

Reliable estimates of carbon and other environmental footprints of agricultural commodities require capturing a large diversity of conditions along global supply chains. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) faces limitations when it comes to addressing spatial and temporal variability in production, transpor...

2020

Wei Tian, Miaojie Yu

Distribution, outward FDI, and productivity heterogeneity: China and cross-countries’ evidence

This paper examines distribution-oriented outward FDI using Chinese multinational firm–level data. Distribution outward FDI refers to Chinese parent firms in manufacturing that penetrate foreign markets through wholesale trade affiliates that resell exportable goods. Our estimations correct for ra...

2020

Robert Koopman, John Hancock, Roberta Piermartini, Eddy Bekkers

The Value of the WTO

Recent developments in global trade include actions by major global traders that lie outside the norms of behaviour of the World Trade Organization (WTO) over the last 20 years. Member frustrations with the slow pace of negotiations and concerns about strategies and behaviours of other members appro...

2020

Neil M. Coe

Logistical geographies

Although logistics are fundamentally geographical and of critical importance to contemporary society, it is only relatively recently that human geographers and cognate social scientists have started to meaningfully engage with the topic. This paper explores this recent growth of interest, which enco...

2020

Lindsay Whitfield, Cornelia Staritz

Local supplier firms in Madagascar’s apparel export industry: Upgrading paths, transnational social relations and regional production networks

This article asks whether and how local firms in low-income countries can participate, upgrade and capture value in apparel global value chains in the context of increased entry barriers and asymmetric power relations. It focuses on Madagascar, which is the top apparel exporter in Sub-Saharan Africa...

2020

Lindsay Whitfield, Cornelia Staritz, Ayelech T. Melese, Sameer Azizi

Technological Capabilities, Upgrading, and Value Capture in Global Value Chains: Local Apparel and Floriculture Firms in Sub-Saharan Africa

Many local firms in sub-Saharan African countries are failing to enter and upgrade in new manufacturing and agribusiness export sectors. This article argues that we need to look more closely at the costly, risky, and uncertain firm-level processes of building capabilities in order to understand this...

2020

Lindsay Whitfield, Cornelia Staritz, Mike Morris

Global Value Chains, Industrial Policy and Economic Upgrading in Ethiopia’s Apparel Sector

This article examines whether low‐income countries can still benefit from participating in manufacturing global value chains (GVCs) in terms of broader industrial development in a global context of greater competition and higher requirements. It contends that developing internationally competitive...

2020

Lindsay Whitfield, Cornelia Staritz

The Learning Trap in Late Industrialisation: Local Firms and Capability Building in Ethiopia’s Apparel Export Industry

Local firms in new supplier countries face major challenges in entering manufacturing global value chains (GVCs) in the context of increased competition and requirements. To understand these challenges, we argue for the importance of looking more closely at local firm capability building, which is a...

2020

Raza, W., Krajewski, M., Tröster, B., Wolfslehner, B.

How can international trade contribute to sustainable forestry and the preservation of the world’s forests through the Green Deal?

High deforestation rates, particularly in tropical areas, remain a pressing concern for the international community, given their impacts on the global climate and the loss of biodiversity. The EU has committed to promoting sustainable forest management both domestically and internationally. However,...

2020

Grumiller, J.; Raza, W.; Grohs, H.

Strategies for sustainable upgrading in global value chains: the Egyptian textile and apparel sector

The promotion of sustainable value chains is on the rise in the EU, with important implications for textile and apparel (T&A) products. EU T&A supplier countries and firms will increasingly have to adapt to the new EU value chain and market dynamics. Based on a case study of the Egyptian T&a...

2020

Anthony Goerzen, Simon Peter Iskander, Joerg Hofstetter

The effect of institutional pressures on business-led interventions to improve social compliance among emerging market suppliers in global value chains

Emerging market governments are incented to attract global value chain (GVC) activities to fuel economic growth. At the same time, in light of real and perceived workplace-related injustices within emerging markets, GVC lead firms are under pressure to improve social standard compliance within their...

2020

Wilts, H.; Schinkel, J.; Feder, L.

Prevention of plastic waste in production and consumption by multi-actor partnerships

The study sheds light on the background of the prevention of plastic waste from packaging and disposable products by explaining the need for action, the environmental impacts and risks to human health. Experiences of the members of the PREVENT Waste Alliance and their partners in the prevention of p...

2020

Henning Wilts, Jennifer Schinkel, Carina Koop

Effectiveness and efficiency of food-waste prevention policies, circular economy, and food industry

According to the World Food Organization about one third of produced food is lost every year on the way from the field to the plate. This level of waste is not only irresponsible from an ethical and social point of view, but also represents a considerable loss of natural resources that are necessary...

2020

Morris M, Robbins G., Hansen U., and I. Nygard

Energy and Industrial Policy Failure in the South African Wind Renewable Energy Global Value Chain: The political economy dynamics driving a stuttering localisation process

This paper utilises a combination of a political economy approach and a GVC framework to analyse the dynamics of the wind energy value chain in South Africa. The paper focuses on the complex intertwined interplay between energy and industrial policy and shows how they negatively impacted on effor...

2020

Philip Sauré, Philipp Herkenhoff

How Expected Inflation Distorts the Current Account and the Valuation Effect

We show that the current account balance (CA) is systematically distorted by an inflation effect, which arises because income on foreignissued debt is recorded as nominal interest in the currency of denomination. Since nominal interest includes compensations for expected inflation, increases in the ...

2020

Menusch Khadjavi, Kacana Sipangule, Rainer Thiele

Social Capital and Large-Scale Agricultural Investments: An Experimental Investigation

Following the 2007–8 global food crisis, agricultural producers have invested in large tracts of land in developing countries. We investigate how the arrival of large-scale farms changes inter-personal trust and reciprocity, important components of social capital, in traditional villages. We elici...

2020

Hamidou Jawara, Rainer Thiele

The Nutrient-Income Elasticity in Ultra-Poor Households: Evidence from Kenya

The relationship between nutrient intake and wealth of poor households continues to be an issue of huge policy relevance. In this paper, we contribute to the ongoing debate on the nutrient-income elasticity using a sample of ultra-poor households with orphans and vulnerable children in Kenya. To est...

2020

Daniel Flemes; Svenja Schöneich

Indigene Völker unter Druck

Der Druck auf die indigenen Völker Lateinamerikas steigt bis hin zur Existenzbedrohung. Die linkspopulistische Regierung Mexikos setzt sich ebenso wenig für die Interessen der Indigenen ein wie die konservative Übergangsregierung in Bolivien. Brasiliens rechtsradikaler Präsident betreibt gar ein...

2020

Christina Saulich

Accessing Global Value Chains: The Politics of Promoting Export-Driven Industrialisation and Upgrading in the Mozambican Cashew Processing Industry

This working paper focuses on the question: How does politics shape the promotion of export-driven industrialisation and firm-level upgrading in Sub-Saharan Africa? It exemplifies this question with an in-depth, qualitative study of the cashew processing industry in Mozambique in the period from...

2020

Jo van Biesebroeck, Alexander Schmitt

Testing Predictions on Supplier Governance from the Global Value Chains Literature

A vast empirical literature analyzes the determinants of the make-or-buy decision, but firms also need to decide how to organize their supplier relationships when they choose to buy. The global value chains framework provides predictions on the nature of buyer-supplier collaboration. We use a unique...

2020

Sébastien Miroudot

Reshaping the policy debate on the implications of COVID-19 for global supply chains

Disruptions in global supply chains in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic have re-opened the debate on the vulnerabilities associated with production in complex international production networks. To build resilience in supply chains, several authors suggest making them shorter, more domestic, and ...

2020

Xuepeng Liu, Aaditya Mattoo, Zhi Wang, Shang-Jin Wei

Services development and comparative advantage in manufacturing

Most manufacturing activities use inputs from the financial and business services sectors. But these services sectors also compete for resources with manufacturing activities, provoking concerns about deindustrialization attributable to financial services in developed countries like the United State...

2020

Heiwai Tang, Fei Wang, Zhi Wang

Domestic segment of global value chains in China under state capitalism

This paper studies the relationship between the changing domestic segment of global value chains and the return of state capitalism in China. To this end, we propose a method to estimate an extended input-output (IO) table that tracks inter-sector transactions between different types of firms in a d...

2020

Sébastien Miroudot, Håkan Nordström

Made in the World? Global Value Chains in the Midst of Rising Protectionism

In the last decade, the concept of ‘global value chain’ (GVC) has become popular to describe the way firms fragment production into different stages that are located in different economies. However, recent evidence indicates that there are lower levels of fragmentation of production. Some author...

2020

Bart Los, Marcel Timmer

Measuring bilateral exports of value added: a unified framework.

We provide a unified framework for measuring bilateral exports of value added. We outline a general methodology that encompasses the measures introduced by Johnson and Noguera (2012) (value added consumed abroad) and Los et al. (2016) (value added in exports), to which we refer as VAX-C and VAX-D, ...

2020

Gary Gereffi

What does the COVID-19 pandemic teach us about global value chains? The case of medical supplies

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a dramatic shortage in the medical supplies needed to treat the virus due to a massive surge in demand as the disease circled the globe during the first half of 2020. Prior to the crisis, there was an interdependence of trade and production for medical supplies, with...

2020

Giovanni Pasquali, Shane Godfrey, Khalid Nadvi

Understanding regional value chains through the interaction of public and private governance: Insights from Southern Africa’s apparel sector

Regional value chains (RVCs) and South–South trade are increasingly considered key features of 21st-century globalisation. This article investigates how RVCs are shaped by the interaction of private and public governance. It evaluates how this interaction unfolded in Southern Africa’s apparel RV...

2020

Johan A. Oldekop, Giovanni Pasquali, Uma Kothari, Aarti Krishnan, Tom Lavers, Aminu Mamman, Diana Mitlin, Negar Monazam Tabrizi, Tanja R. Müller, Khalid Nadvi, Rose Pritchard, Nicholas Jepson, Kate Pruce, Chris Rees, Jaco Renken, Antonio Savoia, Seth Schindler, Annika Surmeier, Gindo Tampubolon, Matthew Tyce, Vidhya Unnikrishnan, Ambarish Karamchedu, Martin Hess, Rory Horner, Upasak Das, David Hulme, Roshan Adhikari, Bina Agarwal, Matthew Alford, Oliver Bakewell, Nicola Banks, Stephanie Barrientos, Tanja Bastia, Anthony J. Bebbington, Ralitza Dimova, Sam Hickey, Richard Duncombe, Charis Enns, David Fielding, Christopher Foster, Timothy Foster, Tomas Frederiksen, Ping Gao, Tom Gillespie, Richard Heeks, Yin-Fang Zhang

COVID-19 and the case for global development

COVID-19 accentuates the case for a global, rather than an international, development paradigm. The novel disease is a prime example of a development challenge for all countries, through the failure of public health as a global public good. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the falsity of any as...

2020

Janpeter Schilling; Elke Hertig, Yves Tramblay; Jürgen Scheffran

Climate change vulnerability, water resources and social implications in North Africa

North Africa is considered a climate change hot spot. Existing studies either focus on the physical aspects of climate change or discuss the social ones. The present article aims to address this divide by assessing and comparing the climate change vulnerability of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and...

2020

Janpeter Schilling; Almut Schilling-Vacaflor, Riccarda Flemmer, Rebecca Froese

A political ecology perspective on resource extraction and human security in Kenya, Bolivia and Peru

This paper analyzes how the governance of non-renewable natural resources affects different dimensions of human security in local sites of extraction. We show how the analysis of human security can be embedded in a multi-scalar political ecology perspective to combine the strong suits of both approa...

2020

Insa Flachsbarth, Jann Lay, Kerstin Nolte, Angela Harding, Ward Anseeuw, Jeremy Bourgoin

Responsible Large-Scale Agricultural Investments in and by G20 Countries: A Call for more Transparency

Many international agricultural land investment projects are criticized because of their disrespect of land tenure rights, the few benefits they provide local populations, and the often displayed negative environmental impacts. The Group of 20 (G20) has recognized the need for more responsible land ...

2020

Jann Lay, Tevin Tafese

Promoting private investment to create jobs: A review of the evidence

The promotion of private investment, in particular in the form of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), has been a key component of economic development strategies since the early 1990s. Recent development policy initiatives, for example the G20 Compact with Africa (CwA) but also Germany's "Marshall Plan...

2020

Bernard Hoekman

Global Value Chains: Inter-Industry Linkages, Trade Costs and Policies

2020

Christopher Findlay, Bernard Hoekman

Value chain approaches to reducing policy spillovers on international business

Government policy can add to the costs of doing international business. It can distort the construction of and raise the costs of operation of global value chains (GVCs), to the detriment of the participating economies. Given rising technological and market-driven headwinds confronting GVCs, countri...

2020

Caio Torres Mazzi, Gideon Ndubuisi, and Elvis Korku Avenyo

Exporters and global value chain participation: Firm-level evidence from South Africa

Using the South African Revenue Service and National Treasury firm-level panel data for 2009-17, this paper investigates how global value chain-related trade affects the export performance of manufacturing firms in South Africa. In particular, the paper uses extant classifications of internationally...

2020

Rocco Macchiavello, Ameet Morjaria

Competition and Relational Contracts in the Rwanda Coffee Chain

How does competition affect market outcomes when formal contracts are not enforceable and parties’ resort to relational contracts? Difficulties with measuring relational contracts and dealing with the endogeneity of competition have frustrated attempts to answer this question. We make progress by ...

2020

Gideon Ndubuisi, Emmanuel Mensah and Solomon Owusu

Export Variety and Imported Intermediate Inputs: Industry-Level Evidence from Africa

Imported intermediate inputs offer access to lower-priced, higher quality, and a wider variety of inputs that can increase the possibility of producing and selling more diversified products in foreign markets. In this paper, we examine this relationship using a novel manufacturing industry-level dat...

2020

Clara Brandi, Jakob Schwab, Axel Berger, Jean-Frédéric Morin

Do environmental provisions in trade agreements make exports from developing countries greener?

Environmental provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are increasing in terms of their number and variety. The economic effects of these environmental provisions remain largely unclear. It is, therefore, necessary to determine whether the trend to incorporate environmental provisions in P...

2020

Keun Lee, Franco Malerba, Annalisa Primi

The fourth industrial revolution, changing global value chains and industrial upgrading in emerging economies

The 4IR can open windows of opportunity for emerging economies but also raises red flags in terms of the main challenges that these changes pose to firms, industrial systems and policy approaches. Benefiting from it will not be automatic, as these economies suffer from several gaps that hamper their...

2020

Annalisa Primi, Manuel Toselli

A global perspective on industry 4.0 and development: new gaps or opportunities to leapfrog?

This paper contributes to the debate on digitalisation and development focusing on industrial organisation and production processes. It analyses the evolution of the global development landscape since the 1990s and provides a taxonomy of channels through which Industry 4.0 is redefining the patterns...

2020

Justine Falciola, Marion Jansen, Valentina Rollo

Defining firm competitiveness: A multidimensional framework

Defining and measuring competitiveness remains a subject of interest as well as debate: policy makers need to understand how competitive their country is relative to others, and how their competitive position evolves overtime (Fagerberg & Srholec, 2017). As such, well-known indicators of country per...

2020

Julian Glitsch, Olivier Godart, Holger Görg, Saskia Mösle, Frauke Steglich

Lagging behind? German Foreign Direct Investment in Africa

German Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Africa is lagging behind China, France, the Netherlands, the UK, the US, and other economies. It represented only 1 percent of the German total FDI stock abroad in 2018 and is concentrated in few African countries. Overall, around 8...

2020

Saskia Mösle, Frauke Steglich

Policy instruments for FDI promotion in Africa

Global foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased substantially over the past decades and so has FDI in Africa. However, still only 3 percent of global FDI stocks and 1 percent of German FDI is located in Africa. There are several policy instruments that can contribute to higher investment in dev...

2020

Adnan Seric, Holger Görg, Wan-Hsin Liu and Michael Windisch

Risk, resilience and recalibration in global value chains

Current global value chains are highly efficient, specialized and interconnected, but also highly vulnerable to global risks. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a stark demonstration of this point, causing supply-side disruptions in the first quarter of 2020, as China and other Asian economies were hit ...

2020

Haiou Mao, Holger Görg

Friends like this: The impact of the US–China trade war on global value chains

This paper considers the indirect impact the recent tariff increases between the United States and China can have on third countries through links in global supply chains. We combine data from input–output relationships, imports and tariffs, to calculate the impact of the tariff increases by both ...

2020

Lars Buur, Rasmus H. Pedersen, Malin J. Nystrand, José J. Macuane, Thabit Jacob

The politics of natural resource investments and rights in Africa: A theoretical approach

Over the past decade and a half, large-scale investments in natural resources in African countries have increased dramatically. While investments in natural resources and agriculture have become more important for African economies, since they have stimulated economic growth and made regimes depende...

2020

Jedrzej George Frynas, Lars Buur

The presource curse in Africa: Economic and political effects of anticipating natural resource revenues

The notion of the ‘resource curse’ suggests that large inflows of extractive industry revenues cause many adverse macro-economic and political effects. The resource curse literature focuses on the impact of actual inflows of extractive resource revenues. However, anticipation of future resource ...

2020

Reena das Nair

The “supermarket revolution” in the South

This chapter evaluates the extent of 'supermarketisation' and internationalisation of supermarket chains and the implications on consumers, suppliers and the competitive landscape. While the degree of both supermarketisation and internationalisation has not been to the extent that was predicted in t...

2020

Reena das Nair, Namhla Landani

New approaches to supermarket supplier development programmes in Southern Africa

Supermarkets are strong catalysts to stimulate the growth and development of suppliers of processed food and manufactured products in Southern Africa. This paper assesses the role of supermarkets and governments in developing supplier capabilities through supplier development programmes. In South Af...

2020

Reena das Nair, Namhla Landani

The role of supermarket chains in developing food, other fast-moving consumer goods and consumer goods suppliers in regional markets.

Supermarkets are strong catalysts to stimulate the growth and development of producers and suppliers of processed food and manufactured products in Southern Africa. This paper assesses the role of supermarkets and governments in developing supplier capabilities through supplier development programme...

2020

Reena das Nair, Namhla Landani

Making agricultural value chains more inclusive through technology and innovation

Some entry barriers in agricultural and agro-processing value chains, particularly for smallholder farmers and small/medium-sized processors, can be overcome with innovation and technology adoption. Technologies and innovation in these sectors have been both radical and incremental, ranging widely t...

2020

Bettina Rudloff, Christine Wieck

Sustainable Supply Chains in the Agricultural Sector: Adding Value Instead of Just Exporting Raw Materials

The corona pandemic has placed supply chains back on the agenda. The economic repercussions spotlight the complexity of today’s global division of labour. Current German and European initiatives are seeking to tighten the responsibility of final business consumers for human rights and sustainabili...

2020

Bettina Rudloff

A Stable Countryside for a Stable Country? The Effects of a DCFTA with the EU on Tunisian Agriculture

Agriculture is central to the stability of Tunisia’s economy and society. The new Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) under negotiation with the EU offers opportunities for the agricultural sector, but also presents risks for the country as a whole. Within Tunisia there is strong e...

2020

Andreas Stamm

Inclusive and sustainable agriculture in Costa Rica – a quality label to promote solidarity-based trade

Compared to other Latin American countries, Costa Rica has good indicators for economic growth and social development. Historically, it has managed to combine inward growth with intelligent use of the options offered by international markets. In recent decades, the country has undergone a strong str...

2020

Stamm, Andreas, Luise Dietrich, Heike Harling, Laura Häußler, Florian Münch, Jana Preiß, Jan Siebert

Sustainable public procurement as a tool to foster sustainable development in Costa Rica: challenges and recommendations for policy implementation

In 2015, Costa Rica was the first country in Latin America to approve a National Policy for Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP). In 2018, a research team from DIE studied the efforts to make SPP a reality in Costa Rica and developed policy conclusions, partly drawing on international experience. ...

2020

Anthony Goerzen, Ari Van Assche

Global value Chain Governance: A Multinational Enterprise Capabilities View

The drivers of economic globalization are leading many firms to disaggregate and redistribute their operations by outsourcing and offshoring. The result of the process is to create global value chains (GVCs) that are a collection of loosely affiliated, spatially distributed firms engaged in bringing...

2020

Adriana Erthal Abdenur

Gender, Climate and Security in Latin America and the Caribbean: From Diagnostics to Solutions

The evidence base on the relationship between climate change and security in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has expanded over the past two years. Recent research has shown that a wide variety of phenomena—from extreme weather events in the Caribbean, to soil erosion in Central America, to c...

2020

Adriana Erthal Abdenur

How Can Artificial Intelligence Help Curb Deforestation in the Amazon?

Deforestation has traditionally been viewed as an environmental issue, but, increasingly, illegal logging in rainforests is being understood as an issue of transnational organized crime. Forests cover 31 percent of the planet, are home to 80 percent of the world’s terrestrial species of animals an...

2020

Adriana Erthal Abdenur

Protecting archaeological sites in the Amazon is essential for environmental wellbeing

Raging fires, expanding mineral extraction and land clearing for agribusiness are not only destroying Amazonian lands and biodiversity, they are also eradicating fundamental knowledge on land stewardship. Climate diplomacy has a key role to play in protecting archaeological sites that preserve lesso...

2020

Krishnan, A and Maxwell, S

Counting carbon in global trade Why imported emissions challenge the climate regime and what might be done about it

The foundations of the climate regime are under threat, with significant implications for developing countries. This report identifies two main threats to the climate regime. The first is the growing importance of emissions traded across national borders, currently accounting for up to 38% of globa...

2020

Krishnan, A, Banga, K and Mendez-Parra, M

Disruptive technologies in agricultural value chains: Insights from East Africa

Global food demand is expected to increase by somewhere between 59% and 98% by 2050 as the world population reaches an estimated 9.7 billion. Food production is especially critical in Africa, where over 70% of the population rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Against a backdrop of the rapid...

2020

DeMarchi, V, DiMaria, E, Krishnan, A and Ponte, S

Environmental upgrading in global value chains

Responding to stakeholder pressure, firms are increasingly challenged to reduce their environmental impacts. This chapter reviews the potential upgrading trajectories for firms engaged in global value chains (GVCs) to effectively reduce the impacts on the environment of all activities linked to thei...

2020

Almut Schilling-Vacaflor

Putting the French Duty of Vigilance Law in Context: Towards Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Violations in the Global South?

The adoption of the French Duty of Vigilance law has been celebrated as a milestone for advancing the transnational business and human rights regime. The law can contribute to harden corporate accountability by challenging the “separation principle” of transnational companies and by obligating c...

2020

Mark Alan Heuer, Usman Khalid, Stefan Seuring

Bottoms up: Delivering sustainable value in the base of the pyramid

Despite a wealth of expertise involving leading institutions over at least 15 years, a base of the pyramid (BoP) model resulting in scalability has yet to emerge. We posit that institutional gaps between BoP goals of developing human and social capital on one hand and a short-term profit focus of bu...

2020

Markus Krajewski

A Nightmare or a Noble Dream? Establishing Investor Obligations Through Treaty-Making and Treaty-Application

This article assesses different approaches currently discussed and developed in international human rights and investment law to establish investor obligations. The article begins with a general framework of analysing and comparing these approaches. Next, attempts to include direct obligations of bu...

2020

Rocco Macchiavello and Ameet Morjaria

Competition and Relational Contracts in the Rwanda Coffee Chain

How does competition affect market outcomes when formal contracts are not enforceable and parties resort to relational contracts? Difficulties with measuring relational contracts and dealing with the endogeneity of competition have frustrated attempts to answer this question. We make progress by stu...

2020

Iain J. Fraser, Julia Schwarzkopf, Martin Müller

Exploring Supplier Sustainability Audit Standards: Potential for and Barriers to Standardization

Global focal companies are increasingly required and expected to monitor the sustainability risks and activities in their supply chains, which has resulted in increasing supplier sustainability audit activity and growth in the number of sustainability initiatives/associations. While common, shared a...

2020

Iain J. Fraser, Martin Müller, Julia Schwarzkopf

Transparency for Multi-Tier Sustainable Supply Chain Management: A Case Study of a Multi-tier Transparency Approach for SSCM in the Automotive Industry

Sustainability in supply chain management (SSCM) has become established in both academia and increasingly in practice. As stakeholders continue to require focal companies (FCs) to take more responsibility for their entire supply chains (SCs), this has led to the development of multi-tier SSCM (MT-SS...

2020

Melanie Müller

Versorgungssicherheit: Marktdynamiken und Machtverschiebungen einplanen

Die Covid-19-Pandemie und der von ihr verursachte Einbruch des globalen Handels haben in verschiedenen Weltregionen eine Debatte über Abhängigkeiten von globalen Lieferbeziehungen entfacht. Mittlerweile deuten sich geographische Machtverschiebungen in Lieferketten an. Noch ist ungewiss, wie sich d...

2020

Maria-Therese Gustafsson; Roger Merino; Martin Scurrah

Domestication of International Norms for Sustainable Resource Governance: Elite Capture in Peru

In recent years, international actors have promoted international norms related to sustainable and inclusive resource governance. However, we know little about how such attempts are contested and adapted in domestic reform processes. Drawing on insights from norm diffusion and institutionalist theor...

2020

Erik Churchill, José-Antonio Monteiro, Victor Stolzenburg & Deborah Winkler

Women and Trade: The role of trade in promoting gender equality

In view of the complexity of the relationship between trade and gender, it is important to assess the potential impact of trade policy on both women and men and to develop appropriate policies to ensure that trade contributes to enhancing opportunities for all. Building on new analysis and data brok...

2020

Ha‐Joon Chang, Antonio Andreoni

Industrial Policy in the 21st Century

Industrial policy is back at the centre stage of policy debate, while the world is undergoing dramatic transformations. This article contributes to the debate by developing a new theory of industrial policy, incorporating some issues that have been neglected so far and taking into account the recent...

2020

Merel Serdijn, Ans Kolk, Luc Fransen

Uncovering missing links in global value chain research – and implications for corporate social responsibility and international business

Purpose Amidst burgeoning attention for global value chains (GVCs) in international business (IB), this paper aims to identify a clear “missing link” in this literature and discusses implications for research and corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy-making and implementation. Design/...

2020

Philip Schleifer, Yixian Sun

Reviewing the impact of sustainability certification on food security in developing countries

What is the impact of sustainability certification on food security in developing countries? This article explores the issue through a systematic review of the extant scholarship, complemented by a selective review of key studies examining the wider socio-economic effects of certification that may a...

2020

Jörg H. Grimm, Joerg Hofstetter, Joseph Sarkis

Corporate sustainability standards in multi-tier supply chains – an institutional entrepreneurship perspective

This study extends research on buyer firm roles in improving supplier sustainability practices by considering institutions – norms and rules – in the organisational field in which suppliers and sub-suppliers operate, exerting pressures on these actors to align their respectivepractices. We intro...

2019

World Bank

World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains

2019

Victor Stolzenburg, Daria Taglioni, Deborah Winkler

Economic upgrading through global value chain participation: which policies increase the value-added gains?

The emergence of global value chains has opened up new ways to achieve development and industrialization. However, new evidence shows that not all countries have gained from participating in global value chains, and that country-specific characteristics matter for economic upgrading in global value ...

2019

Stefano Ponte

Green Capital Accumulation: Business and Sustainability Management in a World of Global Value Chains

Tackling climate change and other environmental crises entails a critical reflection on processes and outcomes that are behind sustainability management by business. Sustainability has become a commodity itself, to be traded, bought, sold and managed like all others. How lead firms in global value c...

2019

Mahwish J Khan, Stefano Ponte, Peter Lund-Thomsen

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

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...

2019

Janina Grabs, Stefano Ponte

The evolution of power in the global coffee value chain and production network

The configurations of global value chains and production networks are constantly changing, leading to new trajectories and geographical distributions of value creation and capture. In this article, we offer a 40-year evolutionary perspective on power and governance in the global coffee value chain a...

2019

Wiebke Hagedorn, Henning Wilts

Who should waste less? Food waste prevention and rebound effects in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals

The issue of food waste prevention plays a role in global and national policies. Such prevention can reap economic and, in particular, environmental benefits. As our study shows, these environmental benefits are often lost due to indirect rebound effects. Income differences play a crucial role here....

2019

Thomas Reardon, Ruben Echeverria, Julio Berdegué, Bart Minten, Saweda Liverpool-Tasie, David Tschirley, David Zilberman

Rapid transformation of food systems in developing regions: Highlighting the role of agricultural research & innovations

Developing regions' food system has transformed rapidly in the past several decades. The food system is the dendritic cluster of R&D value chains, and the value chains linking input suppliers to farmers, and farmers upstream to wholesalers and processors midstream, to retailers then consumers downst...

2019

Joerg S. Hofstetter

Multi-tier sustainable supply chain management

A focal company’s boundary of accountability for social or environmental misconduct in its supply chain is hard to define. Non-sustainable business practices can occur at all stages in the supply chain: at raw material exploitation, intermediate production, or transportation. And it can occur atan...

2019

Matteo Fiorini, Bernard Hoekman, Marion Jansen, Philip Schleifer, Olga Solleder, Regina Taimasova, Joseph Wozniak

Institutional design of voluntary sustainability standards systems: Evidence from a new database

Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) have become a significant element of the governance of international trade and production. Even though VSS are not mandatory (required by law), in practice they are often necessary for producers to participate in global value chains. Finally, VSS are often co...

2019

Laura Alfaro, Pol Antràs, Davin Chor, Paola Conconi

Internalizing Global Value Chains: A Firm-Level Analysis

A key decision facing firms is the extent of control to exert over the different stages in their production processes. We develop and test a property rights model of firm boundary choices along the value chain. We construct firm-level measures of the upstreamness of integrated and nonintegrated inpu...

2019

Stamm Andreas, Tilman Altenburg, Maximilian Müngersdorff, Tim Stoffel, Kasper Vrolijk

Soziale und ökologische Herausforderungen der globalen Textilwirtschaft: Lösungsbeiträge der deutschen Entwicklungszusammenarbeit

Bekleidung für den rasch wachsenden Weltmarkt wird fast ausschließlich in Entwicklungs- und Schwellenländern gefertigt. Die Produktionsbedingungen in diesen Ländern gehen mit erheblichen sozialen und ökologischen Problemen einher. Diese in den Griff zu bekommen, ist eines der wesentlichen Ziele...

2019

Michael Brüntrup

Agricultural growth corridors in sub-Saharan Africa – new hope for agricultural transformation and rural development?

Agricultural growth corridors – areas along a central transport line that receive intensive agricultural investments – are a recent approach to economic development in sub-Saharan Africa. Since they are usually planned and managed as strategic private-public partnerships, they promise to bring t...

2019

Keppner, Benno, Daniel Weiß, Pietro Bertazzi, Bibiana García

Beyond Rhetoric: Why Foreign Policy Needs to Foster Private Sector SDG Implementation.

From conflict prevention to human rights protection – companies are vital for the success of the 2030 Agenda and foreign policy alike. But progress on SDG implementation in the business world is at a turning point. Foreign policy can and must play a decisive role by building a robust knowledge bas...

2019

Raphael Kaplinsky, Mike Morris

Trade and Industrialisation in Africa: SMEs, Manufacturing and Cluster Dynamics

Trade in manufacturing through global and regional value chains has played an especially prominent role in global economic growth in recent decades. However, Africa faces severe challenges in growing manufacturing activities in the face of China and Southeast Asia’s competitive dominance of global...

2019

Amendolagine, V., Chaminade, C., Guimón, J., & Rabellotti, R.

Cross-border Knowledge Flows Through R&D FDI: Implications for Low-and Middle-income Countries.

R&D related foreign direct investments represent a powerful mechanism for cross-border knowledge sharing that can stimulate the process of technological catch-up. However, low-income countries and smaller middle-income countries remain largely excluded from this kind of global flows of knowledge. In...

2019

Rasmus Lema, Carlo Pietrobelli, Roberta Rabellotti

Innovation in global value chains

In this chapter, the authors focus on innovation in global value chains and on the role that such chains play in building and deepening capability. They also focus on the trajectories along which firms, located in developing countries, once inserted into global value chains acquire or lose innovatio...

2019

Vito Amendolagine, Andrea F. Presbitero, Roberta Rabellotti, Marco Sanfilippo

Local sourcing in developing countries: The role of foreign direct investments and global value chains

The local sourcing of intermediate products is one the main channels for foreign direct investment (FDI) spillovers. This paper investigates whether and how participation and positioning in the global value chains (GVCs) of host countries is associated to local sourcing by foreign investors. Matchin...

2019

M. Kaplan, K. Vorwerk, S. Leiderer

From the Paris Declaration to the 2030 Agenda: Is the global sustainability agenda overburdening development cooperation?

2019

Gale Raj-Reichert

The powers of a social auditor in a global production network: the case of Verité and the exposure of forced labour in the electronics industry

Research on labour governance actors in global production networks (GPNs) has been limited to civil society organisations, firms and governments. Understanding the influence of actors in GPNs has been dealt with singular and overt modes of relational power. This paper contributes to both debates by ...

2019

Gale Raj-Reichert

Global Value Chains, Contract Manufacturers, and the Middle-Income Trap: The Electronics Industry in Malaysia

The electronics industry has been a cornerstone to the successful industrialisation process in Malaysia since the 1970s. However, since the 2000s the industry, which is deeply integrated in global value chains, has failed to upgrade. Its stagnation is indicative of the general economic situation in ...

2019

Cosimo Beverelli, Victor Stolzenburg, Robert B. Koopman, Simon Neumueller

Domestic value chains as stepping stones to global value chain integration

2019

Neil M Coe, Henry Wai-chung Yeung

Global production networks: mapping recent conceptual developments

In this framing paper for the special issue, we map significant research on global production networks during the past decade in economic geography and adjacent fields. In line with the core aim of the special issue to push for new conceptual advances, the paper focuses on the central elements of GP...

2019

LONE RIISGAARD, PETER LUND‐THOMSEN, NEIL M. COE

Multistakeholder initiatives in global production networks: naturalizing specific understandings of sustainability through the Better Cotton Initiative

In recent years, various academics, consultants, companies and NGOs have advocated a move towards more cooperative approaches to private sustainability standards to address the widely identified shortcomings of the compliance paradigm. However, is it possible to address these limitations by moving t...

2019

Sotiris Blanas, Adnan Seric, Christian Viegelahn

Job Quality, FDI and Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Firm-Level Data

Using a unique sample of foreign-owned and domestic firms in Sub-Saharan Africa, we study the differences in the quality of jobs that they offer, and identify how these differences are associated with country-level institutional factors. We find that foreign-owned firms offer more stable and secure ...

2019

Chiara Franco, Marco Sanfilippo, Adnan Seric

Investors’ characteristics and the business climate as drivers of backward linkages in Vietnam

This paper analyses the factors determining the establishment of backward linkages and their key features once established. To carry out our analysis, we exploit an original survey conducted in 2011 on roughly 1500 investors based in Vietnam. We show that some characteristics of the investor firm, i...

2019

Bernhard Tröster, Rudiger Arnim, Cornelia Staritz, Werner Raza, Jan Grumiller, Hannes Grohs

Delivering on Promises? The Expected Impacts and Implementation Challenges of the Economic Partnership Agreements between the European Union and Africa

Economic partnership agreements (EPAs) mark a new era in economic relations between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries that will lead to reciprocal tariff liberalization. Model‐based impact assessments have become a powerful tool in trade negotiations and mixed r...

2019

Morris, M. and C. Staritz

Industrialization paths and industrial policy for developing countries in global value chains

Structural transformation to higher productivity and value-added activities remains a key objective for developing countries. Industrial policy has historically had an important role in supporting such transformation processes. Today, the external context is fundamentally different with the rise of ...

2019

Inga Carry

Climate Change, Water Security, and National Security in Jordan, Palestine, and Israel

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is considered a climate hotspot due to its natural water scarcity, low levels of socio-ecological resilience, social tensions and political conflicts, and ongoing immigration crisis. Over the course of the century, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel are proj...

2019

Stefan Pahl, Marcel P. Timmer

Do Global Value Chains Enhance Economic Upgrading? A Long View

Exporting through global value chains (GVCs) has recently been highlighted as a panacea for weak industrialisation trends in the South. We study the long-run effects of GVC participation for a large set of countries between 1970 and 2008. We find strong evidence for the positive effects on productiv...

2019

Nikhil Patel, Zhi Wang, Shang‐Jin Wei

Global Value Chains and Effective Exchange Rates at the Country‐Sector Level

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is one of the most cited statistics in open‐economy macroeconomics. We show that the models used to compute these numbers are not rich enough to allow for the rising importance of global value chains. Moreover, because different sectors within a country part...

2019

Stefan Pahl, Marcel P. Timmer

Patterns of vertical specialisation in trade: long-run evidence for 91 countries

The authors estimate the domestic value-added content in exports of manufacturing goods (VAX-D ratio) for 91 countries over the period from 1970 to 2013. They find a strong decline in the world VAX-D ratio since the mid-1980s mostly accounted for by the substitution of foreign for domestic intermedi...

2019

Stefan Pahl, Marcel P. Timmer, Reitze Gouma, Pieter J. Woltjer

Jobs in Global Value Chains: New Evidence for Four African Countries in International Perspective

What is the potential for job growth in Africa under participation in global value chains (GVCs)? In this study the concept of GVC jobs is introduced which tracks the number of jobs associated with GVC production of goods. A novel decomposition approach is used to account for GVC jobs by three proxi...

2019

Stefano Ponte, Gary Gereffi, Gale Raj-Reichert

Handbook on Global Value Chains

Global value chains (GVCs) are a key feature of the global economy in the 21st century. They show how international investment and trade create cross-border production networks that link countries, firms and workers around the globe. This Handbook describes how GVCs arise and vary across industries ...

2019

Gary Gereffi

Global value chains and international development policy: Bringing firms, networks and policy-engaged scholarship back in

This article argues that the global value chains (GVC) perspective bridges the firm-specific, private-sector and country-level, societal divide that has separated the international business and international economics literatures. A key mechanism that explains the policy impact of the GVC approach a...

2019

Stephanie BARRIENTOS, Lara BIANCHI, Cindy BERMAN

Gender and governance of global value chains: Promoting the rights of women workers

Private governance channelled through social compliance programmes and gender initiatives of multinational companies have had limited impact in tackling gender discrimination in global value chains (GVCs). The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) provide a public–...

2019

Stephanie Barrientos

Gender and Work in Global Value Chains

This book focuses on the changing gender patterns of work in a global retail environment associated with the rise of contemporary retail and global sourcing. This has affected the working lives of hundreds of millions of workers in high-, middle- and low-income countries. The growth of contemporary ...

2019

Janpeter Schilling

An Environment of Insecurity: The Relationship between Environmental Change and Violent Conflict in Northwest Kenya

About the book: Security threats today are increasingly complex, dynamic, and asymmetric, and can affect environmental factors like energy, water, and food supply. As a result, it is becoming evident that the traditional model of nation-state based security is incomplete, and that purely militar...

2019

Arthur Blouin, Rocco Macchiavello

Strategic Default in the International Coffee Market

This article studies strategic default on forward sale contracts in the international coffee market. To test for strategic default, we construct contract-specific measures of unanticipated changes in market conditions by comparing spot prices at maturity with the relevant futures prices at the contr...

2019

Mauro Boffa, Marion Jansen, Olga Solleder

Do we need deeper trade agreements for GVCs or just a BIT?

The paper investigates two policies geared towards stimulating and shaping global value chains (GVCs), namely deep regional trade agreements (DRTAs) and bilateral investment treaties (BITs). In an augmented gravity model, we test the impact of both policies on a variety of trade in value added indic...

2019

Matteo Fiorini, Bernard Hoekman, Marion Jansen, Philip Schleifer, Olga Solleder, Regina Taimasova, Joseph Wozniak

Institutional design of voluntary sustainability standards systems: Evidence from a new database

Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) have become a significant element of the governance of international trade and production. Even though VSS are not mandatory (required by law), in practice they are often necessary for producers to participate in global value chains. Finally, VSS are often co...

2019

Karishma Banga, Neil Balchin

Linking Southern Africa into South Africa’s global value chains

This study explores the potential for South Africa to become an engine for intra- regional trade and industrial development by linking other Southern African countries to its global value chains and, in the process, improving its global trade competitiveness. The study identifies ‘lead products’...

2019

Ismail Doga Karatepe, Christoph Scherrer

Collective Action as a Prerequisite for Economic and Social Upgrading in Agricultural Production Networks

This article highlights the importance of collective action and the role of the state in upgrading the social and economic conditions of farmworkers and smallholders. It is argued that economic upgrading does not automatically translate into social upgrading for workers and small producers and explo...

2019

Sourafel Girma, Holger Görg, Erasmus Kersting

Which boats are lifted by a foreign tide? Direct and indirect wage effects of foreign ownership

The attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI) is considered to be of particular importance for emerging economies because it represents a channel through which international convergence in standards of living may be achieved. One important effect of FDI is its impact on wages, both within the ta...

2019

Sanchita Banerjee Saxena

Labor, global supply chains, and the garment industry in South Asia: Bangladesh after Rana Plaza

This book argues that larger flaws in the global supply chain must first be addressed to change the way business is conducted to prevent factory owners from taking deadly risks to meet clients' demands in the garment industry in Bangladesh. Using the 2013 Rana-Plaza disaster as a departure point, an...

2019

Emily Blanchard

Trade wars in the global value chain era

The nature of global commerce has changed dramatically over the past 40 years, with the meteoric rise of global value chain trade. This column, taken from a recent Vox eBook, builds on insights from recent research to identify three critical dimensions of global value chain trade that promise to mak...

2019

Inga Heiland, Andreas Moxnes, Karen-Helene Ulltveit-Moe, Yuan Zi

Trade From Space: Shipping Networks and The Global Implications of Local Shocks

This paper examines the structure of the shipping network and its implications on global trade and welfare. Using novel data on the movements of container ships, we calculate optimal travel routes. We then estimate the impact of a shock to the network on global trade by means of a natural experiment...

2019

Davin Chor

Modeling global value chains: approaches and insights from economics

In recent years, the emergence of global value chains in how firms organize their production strategies has drawn the attention of economists, particularly those in the field of international trade. This has spawned a growing body of applied theoretical work to capture the fragmentation of productio...

2019

Pamina Koenig, Sandra Poncet

Social responsibility scandals and trade

This paper studies the effect of social responsibility scandals on the imports of consumer products, by focusing on an event which generated massive consumer mobilization against neglecting firms, namely the collapse of the Rana Plaza building affecting the textile industry in Bangladesh. We investi...

2019

Pamina Koenig and Sandra Poncet

Reputation and (un)fair trade: Effects on French importers from the Rana Plaza collapse

This paper analyzes the effects of a major reputational shock affecting textile importers fromBangladesh. The collapse of the Rana Plaza building in April 2013 generated a surge of activismand media coverage specifically targeting the firms that sourced from the factories affected bythe disaster. Us...

2019

Maria-Therese Gustafsson; Martin Scurrah

Strengthening subnational institutions for sustainable development in resource-rich states: Decentralized land-use planning in Peru

Weak institutions have been identified as a principal cause of the poor developmental outcomes of many resource-rich states. Research has largely focused on national-level institutions and governance, whereas their subnational equivalents remain understudied. Subnational governments, partially empow...

2019

Maria-Therese Gustafsson; Martin Scurrah

Unpacking the extractivist state: The role of weak state agencies in promoting institutional change in Peru

When a resource boom has begun it is often challenging to develop institutions for governing natural resources in an inclusive and sustainable manner. Whereas existing studies on resource-rich states have focused on political elites or social mobilization for explaining attempts to strengthen such i...

2019

Asmita Parshotam, Javier Revilla Diez

Economic Growth Corridors Through a Value-Chain Lens: The Case of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor in Tanzania

Tanzania’s Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor (SAGCOT) is a role-model economic growth corridor (EGC). It aims at easing the incorporation of smallholder farmers into global and regional value chains through partnerships with larger agricultural companies. EGCs in general and SAGCOT in particul...

2019

R.D. Garrett, H.K. Gibbs, B. Soares-Filho, R. Sarsfield, X. Rueda, R. Rivero, L.L. Rausch, J.C. Milder, S. Lake, S. Hall, B. Døvre, S. Levy, R. Barr, B. Ayre, Y. le Polain de Waroux, R. Heilmayr, P. Dauvergne, J. Clapp, J. Godar, T.A. Gardner, K.M. Carlson, N. Villoria

Criteria for effective zero-deforestation commitments

Zero-deforestation commitments are a type of voluntary sustainability initiative that companies adopt to signal their intention to reduce or eliminate deforestation associated with commodities that they produce, trade, and/or sell. Because each company defines its own zero-deforestation commitment g...

2019

Antonio Andreoni, Ha-Joon Chang

The political economy of industrial policy: Structural interdependencies, policy alignment and conflict management

Industrial policy is back in the mainstream debates. The paper provides a long-term analytical perspective of the industrial policy debate, and it critically assesses the current mainstream phase of the debate in light of three fundamental theoretical insights that developed along several decades of...

2019

Luc Fransen, Ans Kolk, Miguel Rivera-Santos

The multiplicity of international corporate social responsibility standards

Purpose This paper aims to examine the multiplicity of corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards, explaining its nature, dynamics and implications for multinational enterprises (MNEs) and international business (IB), especially in the context of CSR and global value chain (GVC) governance. ...

2019

Miaojie Yu

China’s manufacturing value chain ascent to date

This chapter utilizes total factor productivity (TFP) to measure the performance of large Chinese firms in 2001–2008. The upgrading of China’s manufacturing value chain that has resulted from integration with world markets has rich policy implications. The chapter describes the performance of th...

2019

Ben Shepherd

Mega-regional trade agreements and Asia: An application of structural gravity to goods, services, and value chains

We use a flexible estimation and simulation platform built on the standard structural gravity model to analyze the trade and welfare implications of mega-regional trade agreements for Asian countries. Our counterfactuals suggest that all current mega-regional scenarios have the potential to generate...

2019

Johannes Van Biesebroeck, Emmanuel Buadi Mensah

The Extent of GVC Engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper exploits information from two different datasets to provide a novel and multi-dimensional picture of the engagement of all sub-Saharan African countries in global value chains (GVCs). It documents in detail the nature of the underlying data and the way it is used to construct several indi...

2018

Michael Brüntrup, Fabian Schwarz, Thomas Absmayr, Jonas Dylla, Franziska Eckhard, Kerstin Remke, Konrad Sternisko

Nucleus-outgrower schemes as an alternative to traditional smallholder agriculture in Tanzania – strengths, weaknesses and policy requirements

2018

Farole, T.; Hollweg, C.; Winkler, D.

Trade in Global Value Chains : An Assessment of Labor Market Implications

The paper is structured in six further sections following this introduction. Section two develops a conceptual framework, and reviews the literature on the relationship between trade integration and labor market outcomes. Section three outlines the empirical framework and data used in the analysis. ...

2018

Marcel P Timmer, Sébastien Miroudot, Gaaitzen J de Vries

Functional specialisation in trade

Production processes are fragmenting across borders with countries trading tasks rather than products. Export statistics based on value added reveal a process of vertical specialisation. Yet, what do countries do when exporting? In this article, we provide novel evidence on functional specialisation...

2018

Laurie S.M. Reijnders, Gaaitzen J. de Vries

Technology, offshoring and the rise of non-routine jobs

This paper documents the growing share of non-routine jobs in the labor force of thirty-seven advanced and emerging countries over the period 1999–2007. To examine the role of offshoring and technological change in driving this labor market development, we develop a task-based model of production ...

2018

Jörg H. Grimm, Joerg S. Hofstetter, Joseph Sarkis

Interrelationships amongst factors for sub-supplier corporate sustainability standards compliance: An exploratory field study

Sub-supplier compliance with a focal firm's corporate sustainability standards (CSS) is increasingly recognized as an important dimension of sustainable supply chain management. This paper draws on recent sub-supplier management studies and their critical success factors (CSFs) to investigate the in...

2018

Davin Chor, Pol Antràs

On the measurement of upstreamness and downstreamness in global value chains

This paper offers four contributions to the empirical literature on global value chains (GVCs). First, we provide a succinct overview of several measures developed to capture the upstreamness or downstreamness of industries and countries in GVCs. Second, we employ data from the World Input-Output Da...

2018

Michael Brüntrup, Fabian Schwarz, Thomas Absmayr, Jonas Dylla, Franziska Eckhard, Kerstin Remke, Konrad Sternisko

Nucleus-outgrower schemes as an alternative to traditional smallholder agriculture in Tanzania – strengths, weaknesses and policy requirements

The public debate about the right type of agriculture for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) often constructs a dichotomy between smallholders and large-scale agriculture. This over-simplification ignores some important intermediary forms for organising agriculture, including nucleus-outgrower schemes (NOSs)....

2018

Carlo Pietrobelli, Anabel Marin, Jocelyn Olivari

Innovation in mining value chains: New evidence from Latin America

The paper investigates new opportunities for innovation and linkages associated to mining activities in Brazil, Chile and Peru. Three types of opportunities were researched: demand side, supply side and local specificities. The last source of opportunities is key for natural resource related activit...

2018

Jorge Katz, Carlo Pietrobelli

Natural resource based growth, global value chains and domestic capabilities in the mining industry

Received theory of production is not very useful if we try to understand what the ‘sources’ of growth are when we deal with natural resource-based sectors of economic activity. In these industries, a complex set of interactions and co-evolution prevails between firms producing the commodity and ...

2018

Xiaolan Fu, Jun Hou, Xiaohui Liu

Unpacking the Relationship between Outward Direct Investment and Innovation Performance: Evidence from Chinese firms

This study investigates the impact of outward direct investment (ODI) by Chinese MNEs on innovation performance and the conditions under which such an impact is moderated, based on a sample of Chinese firms. The empirical evidence suggests that undertaking ODI leads to an increase in the innovation ...

2018

Dennis Davis, Raphael Kaplinsky, Mike Morris

Rents, Power and Governance in Global Value Chains

This paper addresses the  generation  of  rents  and  the  distribution  of  gains  in  the  global  operations  of  governed Global  Value  Chains  (GVCs)  and  seeks  to  provide  an  architecture  for  analyzing  the  governance  of  GVCs.  It distinguishes between f...

2018

Raphael Kaplinsky, Mike Morris

Standards, regulation and sustainable development in a global value chain driven world

Regulations and standards have become an increasingly important factor affecting the capacity of producers to participate in global markets. Directly and indirectly, they not only determine the terms of market-entry but also affect the extent to which different producers are able to position themsel...

2018

Cornelia Staritz, Susan Newman, Bernhard Tröster, Leonhard Plank

Financialization and Global Commodity Chains: Distributional Implications for Cotton in Sub-Saharan Africa

Restructuring of global and local markets has led to an increased influence of commodity derivatives markets on commodity price setting. This has critical implications for price risks experienced by actors along commodity chains. Commodity derivatives markets have undergone significant changes that ...

2018

Philipp Herkenhoff, Sebastian Krautheim

The International Organization of Production in the Regulatory Void

In recent decades, a large and increasing number of leading firms in a diverse set of industries have faced allegations of ‘unethical’ practices along their international value chains. In many cases this has triggered consumer boycotts and NGO campaigns, introducing a new link between upstream (...

2018

Holger Görg, Aoife Hanley, Adnan Seric

Corporate Social Responsibility in Global Supply Chains: Deeds Not Words

The disconnect between the lofty aspirations of firms claiming Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and their shortcomings in practice have caused some observers to question its usefulness. The fallout from events like the Rana Plaza catastrophe has highlighted some of these shortcomings—namely, ...

2018

Philipp Harms, Jakob Schwab

Like it or not? How the economic and institutional environment shapes individual attitudes towards multinational enterprises

This paper analyses the determinants of people's attitudes towards foreign direct investment (FDI) using a survey‐based data set that covers a wide range of rich and poor countries. We find that both individual socioeconomic characteristics and macroeconomic and institutional factors shape agents�...

2018

Svenja Schöneich

Ambigüedades del Petróleo – Cambios de percepción de riesgo al nivel local por la Reforma Energética Mexicana

Este artículo muestra el ejemplo de la comunidad campesina Emiliano Zapata, afectada durante varias décadas por actividades de extracción de hidrocarburos, y cómo entró en un estado de “incertidumbre tóxica” (Auyero y Swistun 2008) debido a las condiciones del cambio político de la extrac...

2018

Nina Engwicht; Janpeter Schilling; Christina Saulich

A local to global perspective on resource governance and conflict

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue ‘A Local to Global Perspective on Resource Governance and Conflict’. It advances the debate on natural resource governance and conflict by bringing together three different strands of literature with the aim of developing a local to glo...

2018

Christina Saulich; Siegmar Schmidt

Das Konfliktpotential großer Rohstoffvorkommen in Mosambik

Current protests and acts of violence have sparked a debate on a potential resource curse in Mozambique. This paper analyses the role of resource abundance in recent societal conflicts in Mozambique. The strand of literature on resources and conflicts sheds no light on the underlying structural sour...

2018

Melanie Müller

Menschenrechtliche Verantwortung beim Abbau von metallischen Rohstoffen am Beispiel von Kupfer

2018

Günther Maihold

Colombia’s Peace and Venezuela’s Turmoil. An Emerging Regional Crisis Landscape in South America

Despite concerted political efforts to isolate the Colombian peace process from Venezuela’s internal unrest, the signs suggest coalescence and tectonic strife in the region. There are justified concerns that the increasingly interconnected constellation of precarious peace in Colombia and growing ...

2018

Inga Carry

Good Water Neighbors? A Study of Environmental Peacebuilding in Israel and Palestine

Water scarcity, pollution, and unequal distribution add complexity to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In response, EcoPeace Middle East engages Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians in cross-border environmental cooperation while promoting dialogue and trust among members of all three societies. ...

2018

Ari Van Assche, Johannes Van Biesebroeck

Functional upgrading in China’s export processing sector

Functional upgrading occurs when a firm acquires more sophisticated functions within an existing value chain. In this paper, we analyze if there is evidence of this type of upgrading in China's export processing regime by investigating dynamics in the relative prevalence of Import & Assembly (IA...

2018

Andrea Andrenelli, Charles Cadestin, Koen De Backer, Sébastien Miroudot, Davide Rigoi, Ming Ye

Multinational production and trade in services

Using the OECD analytical AMNE database, this paper provides new evidence on the services activities of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and discusses the relationship between cross-border trade in services and the production of services through foreign affiliates (“mode 3” trade in services in ...

2018

Bo Meng, Glen P. Peters, Zhi Wang, Meng Li

Tracing CO2 emissions in global value chains

This paper integrates two lines of research into a unified conceptual framework: trade in value-added and embodied emissions in trade. This allows both value-added and emissions to be systematically traced at the country, sector, and bilateral levels through various routes in global value chains. By...

2018

Louise Curran, Khalid Nadvi, Liam Campling

The influence of tariff regimes on global production networks (GPNs)

Despite the recognition that trade policy—in particular, tariff regimes and rules of origin—can affect the geography of production, much GPN analyses pay scant attention to the tariff context of the sector studied. This paper proposes an analytical framework to more effectively integrate these r...

2018

Christoph Scherrer

Labour surplus is here to stay: why ‘decent work for all’ will remain elusive

In 2015, the United Nations agreed to pursue the Sustainable Development Goal #8 ‘To promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all’. The paper argues that this goal will not be achieved. The abundance of persons offering their ...

2018

Quanrun Chen, Kunfu Zhu, Peng Liu, Xiangyin Chen, Kailan Tian, Lianling Yang, Cuihong Yang

Distinguishing China’s processing trade in the world input-output table and quantifying its effects

Distinguishing processing trade is crucial to national input-output table-based research on China's international trade. This paper further investigates the importance of distinguishing China's processing trade in multicountry input-output table-based studies. We focus on the bias in China's bilater...

2018

Markus Krajewski

State duty to protect and corporate responsibility for human rights in global supply chains

The responsibility of transnational corporations for human rights violations in global supply chains continue to be of public interest: Fires in textile factories in Pakistan, environmental destructions due to oil production or worst forms of child labour in mines which produce minerals for electron...

2018

Christine Wieck

International trade rules for food safety and food quality

2018

Yuan Zi

Trade costs, global value chains and economic development

This paper develops a model to study the impact of trade costs on developing countries’ industrialization when sequential production is networked in global value chains (GVCs). In a two-country setting, a decrease in trade costs of intermediates is associated with South joining and moving up the v...

2018

Sophie Hatte, Pamina Koenig

The Geography of NGO Activism against Multinational Corporations

To what extent do Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) monitor global value chains? While NGOs regularly denounce the behavior of multinational corporations throughout the world, their motivations for choosing campaign targets remain largely unknown. Using a new dataset on activists’ campaigns to...

2018

Asmita Parshotam

Cultivating Smallholder Inclusion in Southern Africa’s Macadamia Nut Value Chains

This paper examines the potential for developing a macadamia nut value chain within Southern Africa, while also exploring the potential for incorporating smallholder producers into the macadamia nut industry. Using the country case studies of South Africa, Mozambique and Malawi, the paper examines t...

2018

Philip Schleifer

Varieties of multi-stakeholder governance: selecting legitimation strategies in transnational sustainability politics

Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) are often referred to as the ‘gold standard’ of private governance. However, existing MSIs vary strongly in their institutional designs and the ways in which they use inclusiveness, procedural fairness and, expert-based strategies to create legitimacy for the...

2017

Matteo Fiorini, Bernard Hoekman, Marion Jansen Philip Schleifer, Olga Solleder, Regina Taimasova and Joseph Wozniak

Suppliers’ access to voluntary sustainability standards

Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) have long become a usual attribute of international production and trade. Despite the fact that VSS are not legally binding, in order to be a part of global value chains, they have become de facto mandatory, and non-compliance may lead to exclusion of produce...

2017

Antràs, Pol, Teresa C. Fort, Felix Tintelnot

The Margins of Global Sourcing: Theory and Evidence from U.S. Firms

We develop a quantifiable multi-country sourcing model in which firms self-select into importing based on their productivity and country-specific variables. In contrast to canonical export models where firm profits are additively separable across destination markets, global sourcing decisions natur...

2017

Harry K. Hoffmann, Klas Sander, Michael Brüntrup, Stefan Sieber

Applying the Water-Energy-Food Nexus to the Charcoal Value Chain

Globally, natural resources are increasingly under pressure, especially due to population growth, economic growth and transformation as well as climate change. As a result, the water, energy, and food (WEF) nexus approach has emerged to understand interdependencies and commonly manage resources with...

2017

Carlo Pietrobelli, Cornelia Staritz

Upgrading, Interactive Learning, and Innovation Systems in Value Chain Interventions

Value chain interventions are increasingly used by donors in the context of private sector development. The paper develops a typology of such interventions, and presents the case of one multilateral lending institution – the Inter-American Development Bank. It argues that interventions risk transf...

2017

Jungmichel, Norbert; Christina Schampel, Daniel Weiß

Atlas on Environmental Impacts: Supply Chains

Identifying critical sustainability topics and areas of action in the supply chain represents a first important milestone for companies in sustainable supply chain management. The focus is important to be able to use the limited human and financial resources as effectively and efficiently as possibl...

2017

Philipp Harms, Pierre-Guillaume Méon

Good and useless FDI: The growth effects of greenfield investment and mergers and acquisitions

We explore the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth, distinguishing between mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and “greenfield” investment. A simple model underlines that, unlike greenfield investment, M&As partly represent a rent accruing to previous owners, and do ...

2017

Kunal Sen

What Explains the Job Creating Potential of Industrialisation in the Developing World?

This paper examines why job creation in the manufacturing sector has differed widely across developing countries, using a modified Lewis model that captures the scale, composition and labour intensity effects of industrialisation on job creation. We show that while the scale effect has been mostly p...

2017

Melanie Müller; Bettina Engels; Kristina Dietz

Ausgebaggert: Weltweite Proteste gegen den Bergbau

2017

Melanie Müller

Deutsche Kupferimporte: Menschenrechtsverletzungen, Unternehmensverantwortung und Transparenz entlang der Lieferkette

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht, wie deutsche Unternehmen im Kupferbereich über die Herkunft ihrer Rohstoffe sowie über ihre Menschenrechtsstandards berichten. Die Studie geht dabei in fünf Schritten vor: Das erste Kapitel führt in die Thematik der Unternehmensverantwortung in globalen Lieferk...

2017

Inga Carry

Environmental Peacebuilding Across Borders and Sectors: A Concerted Approach to Multilateral Cooperation in the Middle East

Disputes over water constitute a major area of disagreement between Israel and Palestine. The uncoordinated and irresponsible environmental actions on both sides have created serious ecological and humanitarian hazards that require rapid, yet sustainable action. Those who argue that the water proble...

2017

Wen Chen, Bart Los, Philip McCann, Raquel Ortega-Argilés, Mark Thissen, Frank van Oort

The continental divide? Economic exposure to Brexit in regions and countries on both sides of The Channel

In this paper we employ an extension of the World Input‐Output Database (WIOD) with regional detail for EU countries to study the degree to which EU regions and countries are exposed to negative trade‐related consequences of Brexit. We develop an index of this exposure, which incorporates all ef...

2017

Loren Brandt, Johannes Van Biesebroeck, Luhang Wang, Yifan Zhang

WTO Accession and Performance of Chinese Manufacturing Firms

We examine the effects of trade liberalization in China on the evolution of markups and productivity of manufacturing firms. Although these dimensions of performance cannot be separately identified when firm output is measured by revenue, detailed price deflators make it possible to estimate the ave...

2017

Matthew Alford, Stephanie Barrientos, Margareet Visser

Multi-scalar Labour Agency in Global Production Networks: Contestation and Crisis in the South African Fruit Sector

Integration into global production networks poses significant challenges, and also opens up opportunities, for labour agency. Governance by lead firms affects working conditions and can drive precarious employment; this interacts with and can constrain national labour legislation covering labour rig...

2017

Axel Berger, Dominique Bruhn

Vietnam at a crossroads: engaging in the next generation of global value chains

Vietnam is a lower-middle–income country and, like many of its peers, faces the challenge of upgrading to higher value-added tasks in global value chains (GVCs). Participation and upgrading are not an arbitrary policy objective: both may be of decisive importance for Vietnam’s future economic de...

2017

Ahmad, N, Primi A.

From domestic to regional to global: Factory Africa and factory Latin America?

This chapter provides a brief overview of upgrading and GVC terminologies, providing insights on interpretability pitfalls. It offers evidence of the complementarities between strong domestic supply chains and imports and then demonstrates the importance of strong regional value chains for integrati...

2017

Angie N Tran, Jennifer Bair, Marion Werner

Forcing change from the outside? The role of trade-labour linkages in transforming Vietnam’s labour regime

Do trade-labour linkages improve the conditions and rights of workers in low-wage countries? We consider this question in Vietnam, a market economy with socialist orientation that has seen rapid growth in export manufacturing and foreign direct investment, while signing regional trade agreements, wh...

2017

Jennifer Bair

Contextualising compliance: hybrid governance in global value chains

Widespread disappointment with compliance auditing in supply chains has led to a search for new governance solutions in global industries. Recent scholarship on labour standards in supply chains emphasises the need for complementarity between public and private forms of governance, and the importanc...

2017

Holger Görg, Erasmus Kersting

Vertical integration and supplier finance

This paper studies access to finance by suppliers that are linked to a multinational enterprise. The theoretical framework consists of a property rights model featuring suppliers that are either vertically integrated or sell to the multinational at arm's length, which in turn affects the availabilit...

2017

Bettina Rudloff, Evita Schmieg

European chicken drumsticks for West Africa – a threat to local markets?

Trade in agricultural products is of considerable importance to the economies of most African countries. Imports often play an important role in feeding a growing population. At the same time, they exert competitive pressure on internal production and therefore also put food security at risk. Here, ...

2017

Emily Blanchard

Renegotiating NAFTA: The role of global supply chains

The Trump administration has been outspoken in its criticism of NAFTA, which the president has called “the worst deal ever made”. This column, taken from a recent Vox eBook, argues that reversing the current NAFTA policy environment would not simply wind back the clock to the pre-agreement econo...

2017

Aksel Erbahar, Yuan Zi

Cascading trade protection: Evidence from the US

In a world with increasingly integrated global supply chains, trade policy targeting upstream products has unintended consequences on their downstream industries. In this paper, we examine whether protection granted to intermediate manufacturers leads to petition for protection by their downstream u...

2017

Ximena Rueda, Rachael D. Garrett, Eric F. Lambin

Corporate investments in supply chain sustainability: Selecting instruments in the agri-food industry

Private investments to address environmental issues are perceived as a powerful engine of sustainability. For the agri-food sector, multiple instruments have been developed to green supply chains. Yet little is known about the underlying process and conditions under which green sourcing concerns lea...

2016

Taglioni, D.; Winkler, D.

Making Global Value Chains Work for Development

Economic, technological, and political shifts as well as changing business strategies have driven firms to unbundle production processes and disperse them across countries. Thanks to these changes, developing countries can now increase their participation in global value chains (GVCs) and thus beco...

2016

Thomas Farole

Do global value chains create jobs?

Global value chains (GVCs) describe the cross-national activities and inputs required to bring a product or service to the market. While they can boost exports and productivity, the resulting labor market impacts vary significantly across developing countries. Some experience large-scale manufacturi...

2016

Fiorini Matteo, Schleifer Philip, Sollerder Olga, Tainasova Regina, Jansen Marion, Wozniak Joseph, Hoekman Bernard

Social and environmental standards: Contributing to more sustainable value chains

2016

Mi Dai, Madhura Maitra, Miaojie Yu

Unexceptional exporter performance in China? The role of processing trade

The firm level trade literature finds that exporters are exceptional performers for a wide range of countries and measures. Paradoxically, the one documented exception is the world's largest exporter, China. We show that this puzzling finding is entirely driven by firms that engage only in export pr...

2016

Sebastian Krautheim, Thierry Verdier

Offshoring with endogenous NGO activism

The process of globalization is characterized by an impressive growth of global value chains, as well as the proliferation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) interacting with multinational firms. This paper presents a model of offshoring and NGO–firm interactions in which offshoring to a low...

2016

Sebastian Krautheim, Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr

Wages and International Tax Competition

We introduce wage bargaining and private information into a model of profit shifting and tax competition between a large and a small country. Shifting profits to the small country not only reduces a firm's tax bill but also creates private information on profitability, altering the wage bargaining i...

2016

KUNAL SEN, CHAITALI SINHA

The location choice of US foreign direct investment: how do institutions matter?

We look at the institutional determinants of both within- and across-country variations in US foreign direct investment (FDI) flows over time. The strength of our approach is that in contrast to the previous work that has focused on average FDI flows across countries, we are able to explain both the...

2016

Rajesh SN Raj, Kunal Sen

Moving out of the bottom of the economy? Constraints to firm transition in the Indian informal manufacturing sector

The predominant type of firms in developing countries is small family firms and the self-employed in the informal sector. Very few family firms make the transition to larger firms employing non-family labour. In this paper, we examine the reasons for the low presence of firms employing non-family la...

2016

Günther Maihold

Intervention by Invitation? Shared Sovereignty in the Fight against Impunity in Guatemala

This article deals with the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a joint hybrid commission to investigate impunity in the context of illegal security networks and organized crime. It was set up as an external governance intervention through an agreement between the UN and ...

2016

Xuemei Jiang, Quanrun Chen, Dabo Guan, Kunfu Zhu, Cuihong Yang

Revisiting the Global Net Carbon Dioxide Emission Transfers by International Trade: The Impact of Trade Heterogeneity of China

To revisit global net carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions transfers by international trade for year 2007, this study employs a new world‐wide, multiregional input‐output (MRIO) table in which China's production is separated into domestic use, processing exports, and nonprocessing exports. The results...

2016

Kalina Manova, Zhihong Yu

How firms export: Processing vs. ordinary trade with financial frictions

The fragmentation of production across borders allowsfirms to make and exportfinal goods, or to perform only in-termediate stages of production by processing imported inputs for re-exporting. We examine howfinancial frictionsaffect companies' choice between processing and ordinary trade–implicitly...

2015

Rocco Macchiavello, Ameet Morjaria

The Value of Relationships: Evidence from a Supply Shock to Kenyan Rose Exports

This paper provides evidence on the importance of reputation in the context of the Kenyan rose export sector. A model of reputation and relational contracting is developed and tested. A seller's reputation is defined by buyer's beliefs about seller's reliability. We show that (i) due to lack of enfo...

2015

Sadaat Ali Yawar, Stefan Seuring

Management of Social Issues in Supply Chains: A Literature Review Exploring Social Issues, Actions and Performance Outcomes

The social dimension of sustainable develop- ment and its impact on supply chains have so far received less attention than the environmental dimension. The aim of the research is to explore the intersection between social issues, corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions and performance outcomes...

2015

Rocco Macchiavello and Ameet Morjaria

The Value of Relationships: Evidence from a Supply Shock to Kenyan Rose Exports

This paper provides evidence on the importance of reputation in the context of the Kenyan rose export sector. A model of reputation and relational contracting is developed and tested. A seller’s reputation is defined by buyer’s beliefs about seller’s reliability. We show that (i) due to lack o...

2014

Farole, T.; Winkler, D.

Making Foreign Direct Investment Work for Sub-Saharan Africa : Local Spillovers and Competitiveness in Global Value Chains

Economic, technological, and political shifts as well as changing business strategies have driven firms to unbundle production processes and disperse them across countries. Thanks to these changes, developing countries can now increase their participation in global value chains (GVCs) and thus becom...

2014

Daniele Giovannucci, Oliver von Hagen, Joseph Wozniak

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Role of Voluntary Sustainability Standards

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is becoming a standard feature particularly for large and consumer-oriented firms. What started in the late 1960s as something closer to charity or philanthropy has evolved dramatically in recent years. Yet, as actualization of the CSR concept is increasingly ex...

2014

Kishore Gawande, Bernard Hoekman, Yue Cui

Global Supply Chains and Trade Policy Responses to the 2008 Crisis

The collapse in trade and the contraction of output that occurred during 2008–9 was comparable to, and in many countries more severe than, the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, it did not give rise to the rampant protectionism that followed the Great Crash. The idea that the rise in the frag...

2014

Bernard Hoekman

Supply Chains, Mega-Regionals and Multilateralism: A Road Map for the WTO

At the 9th Ministerial Conference of the WTO in Bali it was agreed to develop a work program to conclude the long-running Doha round. This report argues that any work program should recognize that goods and services are increasingly produced in international supply chains. Many of the policies impac...

2014

Marion Werner, Jennifer Bair, Victor Ramiro Fernández

Linking Up to Development? Global Value Chains and the Making of a Post-Washington Consensus

Over the last decade, the global value chain (GVC) approach, with its associated notions of chain governance and firm upgrading, has proliferated as a mode of analysis and of intervention amongst development institutions. This article examines the adoption and adaptation of GVCs at four multilateral...

2014

Cuihong Yang, Erik Dietzenbacher, Jiansuo Pei, Xikang Chen, Kunfu Zhu, Zhipeng Tang

Processing Trade Biases the Measurement of Vertical Specialisation in China

Vertical specialization (VS) is often measured by the import contents of the exports, using an input–output (I–O) framework. Half of China’s exports are processing exports, which largely depend on imported intermediate inputs and tie up upstream as well as downstream trade partners. Thus, one ...

2013

Shujin Zhu, Xiaolan Fu

Drivers of Export Upgrading

This paper analyses the determinants of export upgrading using a cross-country panel dataset over the 1992–2006 period. The results suggest that the export sophistication of countries is enhanced by capital deepening, engagement in knowledge creation, transfers via investment in education and R&am...

2013

Manfred Wiebelt, Clemens Breisinger, Olivier Ecker, Perrihan Al-Riffai, Richard Robertson, Rainer Thiele

Compounding food and income insecurity in Yemen: Challenges from climate change

This paper provides a model-based assessment of local and global climate change impacts for the case of Yemen, focusing on agricultural production, household incomes and food security. Global climate change is mainly transmitted through rising world food prices. Our simulation results suggest that c...

2013

William Milberg, Deborah Winkler

Outsourcing Economics: Global Value Chains in Capitalist Development

2013

Axel Berger, Matthias Busse, Peter Nunnenkamp, Martin Roy

Do trade and investment agreements lead to more FDI? Accounting for key provisions inside the black box

The previous literature provides a highly ambiguous picture on the impact of trade and investment agreements on FDI. Most empirical studies ignore the actual content of BITs and RTAs, treating them as “black boxes”, despite the diversity of investment provisions constituting the essence of these...

2012

David Kaplan

South African mining equipment and specialist services: Technological capacity, export performance and policy

South Africa has developed a technologically sophisticated and globally competitive mining equipment and specialist services sector. The paper provides evidence for and measurement of technological competency and global competitiveness and a brief outline of why South Africa was successful in this r...

2012

Mike Morris, Raphael Kaplinsky, David Kaplan

“One thing leads to another”—Commodities, linkages and industrial development

With a particular focus on low income economies in SSA, this paper addresses the nature and determinants of linkages from the commodities sectors and challenges the received view that enclave development is an inherent characteristic of resource extraction, particularly in the hard and energy commod...

2012

Lenis Saweda O. Liverpool-Tasie, Alex Winter-Nelson

Social Learning and Farm Technology in Ethiopia: Impacts by Technology, Network Type, and Poverty Status

Improved farm technologies in Ethiopia display high levels of promise and low rates of adoption. This article studies the impact of social networks on technology adoption focusing on social learning through networks based on physical proximity and those based on intentional relationships. Impacts by...

2012

Philipp Harms, Oliver Lorz, Dieter Urban

Offshoring along the production chain

In this paper, we analyze the offshoring decision of firms whose production process is characterized by a particular sequence of steps. International cost differences vary non‐monotonically along the production chain, and moving unfinished goods across borders incurs transport costs. We show that,...

2011

Xiaolan Fu

Processing Trade, FDI and the Exports of Indigenous Firms: Firm-Level Evidence from Technology-Intensive Industries in China

This study examines the impact of processing trade‐foreign direct investment (FDI) on the export competitiveness of indigenous firms using disaggregated firm‐level production data and product‐level trade data from China covering the 2000–07 period. The estimation results show that processing...

2011

Andreas Stamm, Christian von Drachenfels

Value Chain Development: Approaches and activities by seven UN agencies and opportunities for interagency cooperation

Promoting value chain development is increasingly being recognized as a promising approach to address not only economic development, job creation and inclusive growth, but a wider range of social and environmental development issues. The paper outlines the different approaches and perspectives that ...

2008

Andreas Stamm

Agribusiness and poverty reduction: what can be learned from the value chain approach?

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted by the Millennium Summit of 2000 commit the international community to a strategy of accelerated poverty reduction. The proportion of people living under conditions of extreme poverty should be reduced by half by the year 2015 (MDG 1). The MDGs are to...

2006

Andrea Stamm, Christoph Jost, Constanze Kreiss, Katharina Meier, Mike Pfister, Philipp Schukat, Henning A. Speck

Strengthening value chains in Sri Lanka’s agribusiness: a way to reconcile competitiveness with socially inclusive growth?

Altenburg Tilman, Dani Rodrik

Green industrial policy: Accelerating structural change towards wealthy green economies

The Chapter discusses the conceptual foundations of green industrial policy. Altenburg and Rodrik explain why looking through the lens of industrial policy provides important insights for a green transformation. They summarize lessons learned from decades of experimentation with, and research on, in...

S. Chisoro-Dube, R. das Nair

Confronting entry barriers in South Africa’s grocery retail sector

Günther Maihold, Fabian Mühlhöfer

Supply Chain Instability Threatens Security of Supplies

The Covid pandemic has severely upset global supply chains. This disruption has now spread to many branches of industry, and consumers are starting to feel the impact. No short-term improvement is in sight, which has serious implications for manufac­turing processes all over the world. To begin wit...

Michele Delera

Is production in global value chains (GVCs) sustainable? A review of the empirical evidence on social and environmental sustainability in GVCs

Sustainability in global value chains (GVCs) hinges on the interplay between specialisation, scale, and efficiency effects. This paper reviews different strands of literature which provide evidence on these channels. The evidence that I collect suggests that the sustainability impacts of GVCs are am...

Meng Li, Bo Meng, Yuning Gao, Zhi Wang, Yaxiong Zhang, Yongping Sun

Tracing CO2 Emissions in Global Value Chains: Multinationals vs. Domestically-owned Firms

This study integrates the new global value chain (GVC) accounting method that explicitly considers the difference in the production functions of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and domestically-owned firms into existing production- and consumption-based CO2 emissions measures. This enables us to co...

Franziska Ollendorf, Goodlet Ansah

Local Cocoa Marketing under Pressure: Sustainability certification and new forms of competition in Ghana’s cocoa industry

In the context of persisting sustainability challenges in the Global Cocoa-Chocolate Chain (GCCC), sustainability certification gained momentum as a major industry response. While much research has been undertaken regarding the effects of certification schemes on farming practices and farmers’ liv...

Kate Macdonald, Rachael Diprose, Janina Grabs, Philip Schleifer, Justin Alger, Bahruddin, Ben Cashore, Paul Cisneros, Deborah Delgado, Rachael Garrett, William Hopkinson

Jurisdictional Approaches to Sustainable Commodity Governance

Jurisdictional approaches (JAs) have emerged over the past decade as a significant mode of sustainable commodity governance, particularly in tropical forest countries. JAs are characterized by multi-stakeholder initiatives with substantial government involvement, aiming to integrate environmental, s...

Antonio Andreoni, Keun Lee & Sofia Torreggiani

Global Value Chains, ‘In-Out-In’ Industrialization, and the Global Patterns of Sectoral Value Addition

Since the emergence and diffusion of regional and global value chains, production-chain development has always played a key role in shaping countries’ structural transformation. Over the years, the geographical breadth, length, and depth of these chains have changed significantly. Building on the ...