︎

Elizabeth A. Bennett, PhD, is the Joseph M. Ha Associate Professor of International Affairs and Director of Political Economy at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She recently completed a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, is an on-going fell...

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

The sustainable development agenda has long been linked with social justice, income equality, and workers' rights. This article argues that voluntary sustainability standards-setting organizations (VSSSOs) can contribute to these goals by requiring employers to pay living wages and actively sup...

Adriana Erthal Abdenur is a Brazilian policy expert and co-founder of Plataforma CIPÓ, an independent, women-led research institute dedicated to issues of climate, governance and peace in Latin America and the Caribbean and across the Global South. Since 2023, she has worked as Special Advisor for ...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Mining

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Latin America

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...

Nora Aboushady is a Researcher in the "Research Network Sustainable Global Supply Chains" project at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), and Associate Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University. She holds a Ph.D. from the Ins...

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...

Prachi is a Senior Research Officer at the International Economic Development Group, ODI. In the last decade, she has worked extensively on empirical analysis of trade policy, regional trade agreements, and value chains across Africa, Asia, and South America. Prior to ODI, she was an international c...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

The Middle East and North Africa

A health crisis can impact GVCs adversely by raising bilateral trade costs and via supply- and demand-sideshocks in the exporting and importing countries.Focusing on trade in select GVC-intensive sectors, we disentangle the effects of these different channels in the context of SARS and MERS in a str...

Dr. Matthew AIford is a Senior Lecturer at the Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. His research interrogates questions of development in the context of globalization, transnational trading networks and labour. More specifically, he focuses on the role of nation states in g...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

Social and working conditions

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Uncategorized

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 ...

Tilman Altenburg leads the research programme “Transformation of Economic and Social Systems” at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). He received his doctorate in Economic Geography in 1991. Tilman has done empirical research on economic development in Latin America, As...

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...

Antonio Andreoni is Professor of Development Economics at the Department of Economics, SOAS University of London. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor at the South African Research Chair in Industrial Development at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and Honorary Professor at the I...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

East Asia and Pacific

The Middle East and North Africa

This paper maps the emerging opportunities and challenges for diversification into renewable energy technology value chains and develops a framework that analyses how Morocco can potentially localise and capture value within these supply networks, including leading the building and development of re...

Pol Antràs is Robert G. Ory Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught since 2003. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where he served as Director of the International Trade and Organization (ITO) Working Group. He is also a Res...

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...

Elvis K. Avenyo is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Competition, Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Before joining CCRED, he was a Research Officer at the Technology and Management Centre for Development (TMCD), Oxford Department of Inte...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

The Middle East and North Africa

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) in South Africa has undoubtedly been ambitious in seeking to transform ownership, control, and management of the economy's productive assets and resources. While BEE policy has been applied as the African National Congress government's primary strategy for ...

Jennifer Bair is a sociologist of globalization, with interests in trade and the political economy of development, and the relationship between gender and work. Her research agenda centers on the comparative study of export-led development, and she has conducted fieldwork in Mexico, the Dominican R...

The relationship between power, governance and value creation/capture is a central concern in global value chain (GVC) research. In the context of calls to develop a more expansive view of power in GVCs, we argue for retaining a focus on bargaining power, but shifting the conceptualization of bargai...

Penny Bamber is a global value chain specialist, with over fifteen years of experience working at the intersection of international economics and economic development with Duke University. Her expertise lies in examining global industry dynamics to identify opportunities for different actors to enga...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

The Middle East and North Africa

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Energy

Sustainability standards

Latin America

Eastern/Non-EU Europe and Central Asia

North America

China’s role in global value chains (GVCs) has changed fundamentally in recent decades. The country has moved from being the world factory for a diverse range of low-tech, mid-tech, and high-tech consumer goods to the goal of becoming a technological leader in sectors linked to advanced manufactur...

Dr. Sanchita Banerjee Saxena holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles and has close to 20 years of experience working on issues related to labor rights in global supply chains, with a special focus on the garment industry in Asia. She is currently a Senior Advi...

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 reta...

Karishma Banga is a Research Fellow in Digital Development at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, Brighton. Her research examines new models of digital-led development, changing nature of Global Value Chains and digital trade negotiations, with a focus on development im...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Services

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Justin has a 25-year track record in Global Value Chain research and international industrial and trade policy development. He was recently responsible for compiling Mauritius’ new industrial policy, and led the development of South Africa’s automotive, extra heavy transport equipment, and cloth...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

This chapter 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 industrialization and development of South Africa and of the Southern African region will depend...

Stephanie Barrientos is an Emeritus Professor in the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester. She was previously a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (2000-7). She gained her BA and PhD in Political Economy at the University of Kent...

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–...

Dr. Axel Berger is Deputy Director of the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). Axel holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Duisburg-Essen and a Master’s degree from the Munich Ludwig-Maximilians-University in political science, economics and modern hist...

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...

Emily Blanchard is a leading expert on international economic policy, associate professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, research fellow with the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a member of the CESifo research network. She served as chief economist of the US Department of St...

Article 6 of the SPS Agreement presents a series of interlinked obligations for importing and exporting countries of diseased agricultural products. The Russia–Pigs dispute raises the question of when an importing country is justified in imposing a ban on products from exporting countries unaffect...

Jan Börner is Professor for Economics of Sustainable Land Use & Bioeconomy at the University of Bonn, Germany, with applied research experience in Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Between 2012 and 2017, he was Robert Bosch Junior Professor for Economics of Sustainable Natural Resource Use at the ...

Agriculture and food

Environment and climate change

Latin America

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 le...

Clara Brandi is Head of the Research Programme “Transformations of Economic and Social Systems” at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS). She holds a PhD from the European University Institute, a Master’s degree from the University of Oxford (MPhil in Politics) and a Ma...

Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) are transnational governance instruments that can be leveraged to pursue sustainable development in global value chains. They have proliferated since the 1990s in terms of their number and the share of global production they govern. This paper shares some key...

Braun is an economist, with a Doctoral degree in agricultural economics from University of Göttingen, Germany. He joined ZEF as Professor and Director of the Department for Economic and Technological Change in December 2009. He was also Director of ZEF during its foundation phase 1997-2002. von Bra...

Agriculture and food

Environment and climate change

Michael Brüntrup is an agricultural engineer and holds a PhD in agricultural economics. After some year in academics and as a freelance consultant, he works at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) since 2003. His interests cover topics related to agriculture and rural devel...

Several overlapping crises are posing a risk to economic development and efforts to combat poverty, especially in sub-Saharan African countries, and, in the most extreme case, jeopardising the food security of millions of people. While the short term priority is to support these individuals, we cann...

Dr. Franca Bülow is a political scientist employed at Leuphana University, where she coordinates a research consortium on sustainability governance of global value chains. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection of climate change, resilience, and the governance of global value ch...

Realising resilience requires long-term, strategic transformation. However, this is often forestalled by immediate, often reactive, post-disaster needs. Here, we use Natural Language Processing to compare media coverage of Cyclone Gabrielle, a significant storm affecting Aotearoa New Zealand (A-NZ) ...

Lars Buur has been Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University, Denmark since 2014. His research focuses on the political economy of extractive natural resource governance and post-conflict state formation in Southern and Eastern Africa. From 2015-202...

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

Social and working conditions

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...

Julia Cajal-Grossi is an Assistant Professor in Economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID) and a CEPR Affiliate in the Trade (ITRE) and Development (DEV) Programmes. She does research at the intersection between development, international trade and industrial organization. Julia studies m...

Supply chain disruptions have recently been at the center of both academic and policy debates. After reviewing some of the emerging literature on supply chain disruptions, we discuss the role of buyers' sourcing strategies in mediating responses to such shocks. We focus on two dimensions of a b...

Federico Cammelli is a postdoctoral researcher at the Environmental Policy Lab of ETH Zurich. He received his PhD in Economics from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). His research focuses on designing and assessing public and private policies to mitigate commodity driven deforestation...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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 ...

Inga Carry is an Associate in the “Research Network Sustainable Global Supply Chains” project at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) and a doctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on (critical) raw material supply chains, international ...

Davin Chor is an Associate Professor and Globalization Chair at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He received his AB, AM, and PhD from Harvard University, and was previously Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore and Visiting Assistant Professor at Princeton Univ...

Trade and FDI

East Asia and Pacific

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...

Neil joined the School of Geosciences in July 2022, after ten years in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore, where he was Head of Department from 2012-18. Prior to that he spent twelve years in Geography at the University of Manchester. He is interested in the compl...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Prof. Dr. Peter Dannenberg is a Professor of Human Geography with a focus on urban and regional development at the University of Cologne. He earned his Master’s in City and Regional Development from Cardiff University and a Diploma in Geography from Hannover University. He completed his doctorate ...

Agriculture and food

Sub-saharan Africa

Environment and climate change

In the context of multiple crises, policymakers and practitioners prioritize the solving of certain challenges above others. In this context, supposedly purely environmental challenges like biodiversity loss have often been deprioritized and solutions to tackle them are publicly or quietly postponed...

Reena Das Nair is Associate Professor and Acting Director at the Centre for Competition, Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Reena has worked for specialist economic consultancy Acacia Economics offering expertise in competition and regulat...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

The adoption and use of digital technologies in the supply chains of large and lead firms has the potential to increase the participation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) along food value chains in various ways. At the primary level of food value chains, better traceability through digit...

Gaaitzen de Vries is associate professor at the Groningen Growth and Development Centre at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, professor of global value chains at the University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China, and UNU-WIDER non-residential senior research fellow. H...

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...

Amirah El-Haddad is a senior economist at the German Development Institute (IDOS) and Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences (FEPS), Cairo University. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland at College Park (2005), during which time she also ...

Manufacturing

The Middle East and North Africa

The COVID-19 outbreak has had severe economic consequences across the globe. The crisis emanating from the pandemic has caused demand and supply side shocks, more far reaching than any crisis in living memory. We use a new data set from the 2020/21 Egyptian Industrial Firm Behavior Survey to examine...

Sherwat Elwan Ibrahim is Associate Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management at the American University in Cairo's (AUC) School of Business. She is Chapter Chair and founding member for PRME Chapter Africa, and was previously the Director of the MBA and EMBA programs AUC. Her previous ro...

The topics of globalization and sustainability are very much intertwined. Globalization plays an important role in the redistribution of resources, thereby bringing significant sustainability implications to the involved countries. Each topic on its own is complex to study, and when combined this ad...

Amélie zu Eulenburg is Head of Department for Sustainable Economic and Social Development at the DEval. She holds a Master in Economics and East European Studies focusing on development and transition economics at the Free University of Berlin. She worked as Project Manager in development cooperati...

Manufacturing

Social and working conditions

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...

Thomas Farole is a Lead Economist in the Europe & Central Asia Sustainable Development Practice Group, where he has been leading development of the regional climate and green transition strategies. Prior to that he worked in the Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice, focusing on the global jobs...

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...

Karina Fernandez-Stark is an international consultant and a Senior Fellow at the Duke Center for International Development, who has led numerous research projects related to economic development and competitiveness around the world. She has consulted for the ECLAC, Inter-American Development Bank, O...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

The Middle East and North Africa

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Energy

Sustainability standards

Latin America

Eastern/Non-EU Europe and Central Asia

North America

China’s role in global value chains (GVCs) has changed fundamentally in recent decades. The country has moved from being the world factory for a diverse range of low-tech, mid-tech, and high-tech consumer goods to the goal of becoming a technological leader in sectors linked to advanced manufactur...

Luc Fransen is Associate Professor of International Relations and member of the Political Economy and Transnational Governance (PETGOV) Research Group as well as the Transnational Configurations, Conflict and Governance Research Group. He received his PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Amst...

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

South Asia

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Xiaolan Fu is Director of the Technology and Management Centre for Development (TMCD), Professor of Technology and International Development and Fellow of Green College at Oxford University. She was President of the Chinese Economic Association (Europe) and CEA (UK) (2010-2011). Her research interes...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Services

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

This paper presents a review of the literature concerning the relationship between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and structural transformation in emerging and developing countries based on journal publications over the 2000 to 2020 period. Both outward and inward foreign direct investment by mult...

Rachael Garrett is the Moran Professor of Conservation and Development at Cambridge University in the Department of Geography. Dr. Garrett's research examines interactions between land use, ecosystem services, and economic development at multiple spatial and temporal scales to better understand the ...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

East Asia and Pacific

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Gary Gereffi is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Duke University and the founding Director of the Duke Global Value Chains (GVC) Center. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Notre Dame and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. Gereffi has published over a dozen books an...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

East Asia and Pacific

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Uncategorized

China’s role in global value chains (GVCs) has changed fundamentally in recent decades. The country has moved from being the world factory for a diverse range of low-tech, mid-tech, and high-tech consumer goods to the goal of becoming a technological leader in sectors linked to advanced manufactur...

Holger Görg is Professor of International Economics at the University of Kiel, Head of the Research Center “International Trade and Investment” at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), and Director of the Kiel Centre for Globalization (KCG). He is also affiliated with the Tuborg Centr...

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

East Asia and Pacific

Environment and climate change

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Janina Grabs is an Assistant Professor of Business and Society at the Department of Society, Politics and Sustainability at ESADE Business School, Barcelona. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Münster, Germany, and previously was a post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zuric...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

East Asia and Pacific

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) are transnational governance instruments that can be leveraged to pursue sustainable development in global value chains. They have proliferated since the 1990s in terms of their number and the share of global production they govern. This paper shares some key...

Mag. Dr. Jan Grumiller is a professor of value chains at the IMC University of Applied Sciences Krems and holds a doctoral degree in economics from the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). He worked as a researcher (2015-2022) in the Global Economy and Development department at the Aust...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Based on an overview of both the global cocoa-chocolate value chain and the specifics of the cocoa industry in Ghana as well as the associated sustainability issues, this report provides a comprehensive review of sustainability initiatives in the cocoa-chocolate GVC initiated during the last 20 year...

Maria-Therese Gustafsson is Assistant Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University. Prominent themes in her research are the impacts of global policies and private governance initiatives, on local communities in the Andean region and in Brazil. Empirically, she has fo...

Agriculture and food

Mining

Environment and climate change

Sustainability standards

Latin America

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...

Philipp Harms is a Professor of International Economics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. His research interests are in international economics, macroeconomics, and political economy. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of St. Gallen, Switzerland....

Trade and FDI

East Asia and Pacific

Environment and climate change

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 ...

Philipp Herkenhoff is a data analyst for Medialine Group. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of International Finance at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His research interests are in international trade, international finance, and global value chains. He holds a PhD from ...

Trade and FDI

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Social and working conditions

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Locating substantial parts of the production process in developing and emerging economies, many firms face an increasing demand by stakeholders for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) along their value chains. Contractual incompleteness between firms and their suppliers at different stages of prod...

Bernard is Professor and Director, Global Economics at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He is also a CEPR Research Fellow, where he co-directs the Trade Policy Research Network; a Senior Associate of the Economic Research Forum for the...

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

The Middle East and North Africa

Sustainability standards

Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) are transnational governance instruments that can be leveraged to pursue sustainable development in global value chains. They have proliferated since the 1990s in terms of their number and the share of global production they govern. This paper shares some key...

Dr. Joerg S. Hofstetter, an expert in sustainability, procurement and multinational multi-tier value chains with over 20 years of experience, is Associate Professor in Supply Chain Management at KEDGE Business School Bordeaux, President of the International Forum on Sustainable Value Chains (ISVC), ...

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Uncategorized

A growing interest in the circular economy concept has pushed the discourse in various management-related disciplines beyond established boundaries, with calls to better address how such a model may be developed in a world of global value chains. Still, the conventional linear economy model continue...

Johannes Jäger is a professor and head of the economics department at the University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna. His research focuses on critical international political economy, global finance, regional development, European integration and Latin America. He obtained his PhD in economics with ...

Trade and FDI

Environment and climate change

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Dr. Marion Jansen is Director of the Trade and Agriculture Directorate (TAD) at the OECD since 14 September 2020. Before joining the OECD, Dr. Jansen was the Director for the Division of Market Development and Chief Economist at the International Trade Centre (ITC) in Geneva having also been their S...

Trade and FDI

Services

Sustainability standards

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...

David Kaplan is Emeritus Professor of Business Government Relations, School of Economics at the University of Cape Town. He has extensive experience in working with the government of South Africa and consulted the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the United Nations Economic Commission for A...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

Services

This chapter 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 industrialization and development of South Africa and of the Southern African region will depend...

Markus Kaplan is currently Executive Director at the Development and Peace Foundation/Stiftung Entwicklung und Frieden (SEF). Previously, he was a Senior Evaluator at the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval), Senior Researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability ...

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Raphael Kaplinsky is an Honorary Professor at the Science Policy Research Unit. He is also an Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Development Studies and at the Open University. His primary research interests are in Globalization, Global Value Chains, Inclusive Growth and Innovation, the Terms of...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

Sustainability standards

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...

Pamina Koenig is a Professor of Economics at the University of Rouen and an Associate Researcher at Paris School of Economics. Her research interests are in international trade, trade policies and the political economy of NGOs. She has published in leading academic journals. Professor Koenig holds a...

Trade and FDI

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

EU / Western Europe

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Robert B. Koopman is currently a Hurst Senior Professorial Lecturer in Politics, Governance and Economics at the American University, Washington D.C. Previously, he served as the Chief Economist and Director of the Economic Research and Statistics Division at the World Trade Organization. In this po...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

East Asia and Pacific

Eastern/Non-EU Europe and Central Asia

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...

Aleksandra Kordalska is an Assistant Professor at the Gdańsk University of Technology. Her scientific interests centre on global value chains, with a particular emphasis on the trade dynamics of Central and Eastern European countries. Her research expertise includes functional specialisation and th...

Manufacturing

Services

EU / Western Europe

Eastern/Non-EU Europe and Central Asia

This paper aims to identify patterns of functional specialisation (FS) in global value chains (GVCs) and determinants of upgrading them for selected Central Eastern European (CEE) economies. By combing the World Input-Output Database with data on occupations, we reveal a new FS pattern among subgrou...

Prof. Dr. Markus Krajewski is University Professor at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and holds the Chair in Public Law and Public International Law. Prof. Krajewski is one of the programme directors of the MA in Human Rights and chairperson of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Human Ri...

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

This paper assesses mandatory human rights laws for companies in light of the public–private divide in international human rights law. It asks whether and to what extent these laws contribute to the blurring of the private–public divide by reducing or even eliminating the boundaries between the ...

Sebastian Krautheim is a Professor of International Economics at the University of Passau. His research interests are in international trade, global value chains, and social activism. He is principle investigator of a DFG-funded research project on “Global Production and its Watchdogs: Firms and N...

Trade and FDI

South Asia

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Locating substantial parts of the production process in developing and emerging economies, many firms face an increasing demand by stakeholders for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) along their value chains. Contractual incompleteness between firms and their suppliers at different stages of prod...

Aarti Krishnan is a Hallsworth Research fellow at the University of Manchester. She is a developmental economist, working at the nexus of environment, trade and development. Her areas of expertise include value chain analysis, green growth, agricultural transformation, innovation and knowledge syst...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Dr. Sarosh Kuruvilla is Professor of Industrial Relations, Asian Studies and Public Affairs at Cornell University. His recent research focuses on creating policy strategies to enhance skill upgrading and labor policies. His work has influenced government policies and practices in Asia, notably in Si...

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

In due diligence and accountability regimes, how will regulators and lead firms themselves know who is harming workers or running big risks for the environment? And, how will the rest of us— business partners, (including upstream suppliers), workers and their unions, investors and researchers—kn...

Jann Lay is Head of the Research Programme “Globalization and Development” at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg. As adjunct professor, he teaches development economics at the University of Goettingen. His work is on various facets of economic development in the Glo...

Vietnam's deep integration into GVCs has been driven by the establishment of special economic zones (SEZs). This paper examines the local labour market impacts of this SEZ programme. We trace the built-up area of SEZs over time to construct a novel continuous measure of SEZ exposure using histo...

Rasmus Lema is an Associate Professor at United Nations University-Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT). Previously, he was Associate Professor at Aalborg University Business School and Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. He obt...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Services

East Asia and Pacific

Environment and climate change

EU / Western Europe

Energy

Sustainability standards

North America

Bart Los is professor of technological progress and structural change at the Groningen Growth and Development Centre at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and is currently vice-president of the international input-output association. He has been joint leader of the World Input-Output Data...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

East Asia and Pacific

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 develo...

Dr Rocco Macchiavello holds a PhD in Economics from LSE, where he is currently Professor in Management. Previously, Dr. Macchiavello has been a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford University), Harvard Kennedy School, and a Professor of Economics at Warwick University. Dr. Macchiavello a...

Supply chain disruptions have recently been at the center of both academic and policy debates. After reviewing some of the emerging literature on supply chain disruptions, we discuss the role of buyers' sourcing strategies in mediating responses to such shocks. We focus on two dimensions of a b...

Kate Macdonald is an Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the politics of transnational production and business, with a particular focus on labour, human rights and environmental regulation of global business. She ...

Mining

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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

Günther Maihold is Non-Resident Senior Fellow at and former Deputy Director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). Coming from a background of Political Science and Sociology, Prof Maihold received his doctorate in 1987 from the University of Regensburg, where he subs...

The second chapter by Günther Maihold investigates the connection between shadow supply chains and criminal markets. He challenges the assumption of a “geographical convergence of illicit flows and criminal networks” in which transnational networks of organised crime “have cast a net of conta...

I am employed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but I will soon return to Wageningen University to research EU sustainability regulations in food value chains and their effects in low and middle-income countries. I started my career working in development and spent nine years as an 'Advisor Sustai...

Kalina Manova is Professor of Economics at the University College London, specializing in international trade and investment. At UCL, she also served as Deputy Department Head in 2020-2023. She received her AB, AM and PhD from Harvard, and was previously Assistant Professor at Stanford, Visiting Ass...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Mining

Services

East Asia and Pacific

EU / Western Europe

Energy

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 ...

Emmanuel Buadi Mensah is currently assistant professor at Utrecht University. Between 2020-2022, he was postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics and Business, and Fellow at Groningen Growth and Development Center. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from UNU-MERIT/Maas...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Services

The Middle East and North Africa

Sustainability standards

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...

Birgit Meyer is economist at WIFO and works in the Research Group "Industrial, Innovation and International Economics". She is also Lecturer at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration and External Research Fellow at the Kiel Centre for Globalization. She holds a degree in Econ...

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Geoeconomic concepts are gaining importance in EU trade policy. In this context new trade policy instruments are designed to protect the internal market against unfair trade practices, coercive actions as well as to ensure sustainable supply chains and the protection of human rights. The study exten...

Sébastien Miroudot is Senior Trade Policy Analyst at the OECD Trade and Agriculture Directorate, and holds a PhD in International Economics from SciencesPo Paris. Before joining the OECD, he worked for several years at Groupe d’ Economie Mondiale. His research interests include global value chain...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Services

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...

Ameet Morjaria is an Associate Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Prior to joining Kellogg, he was a Junior Scholar of Harvard Academy's Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs and a Giorgio Ruffolo Post-Doctoral F...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

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...

Mike Morris is Emeritus Professor within the School of Economics and and Honorary Research Associate in the IDS at the University of Sussex. Prior to this was the founder and Head of School of Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal from 1995 – 2002. His recent research, policy activities...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Energy

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Latin America

This chapter 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 industrialization and development of South Africa and of the Southern African region will depend...

Melanie Müller is a Senior Associate with a focus on Southern Africa at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, SWP) in Berlin and head of the research project „Approaches for Transnational Governance of Sustainable Commodity Supply Chains�...

Around 30,000 artisanal miners (Zama Zamas) work in and around active and abandoned mines in South Africa. However, weak governance and oversight of illegal mining have resulted in lawlessness, insecurity, and hundreds of deaths over the years. These mining sites have become some of the most violent...

Khalid Nadvi is a Political Economist specializing on issues relating to trade and industrial development, heading the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. His work has focused on small enterprise clusters, global value chains and production networks, global standards, corpo...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Services

Environment and climate change

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Energy

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Gideon Ndubuisi is Assistant Professor at the Delft University of Technology, and Affiliated Researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (IDOS/DIE). Previously, Gideon was employed as Research Economist at the IDOS. He has a BSc. i...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Services

Social and working conditions

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...

Jens Newig is a Professor of Governance and Sustainability at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He heads the Institute of Sustainability Governance of Leuphana’s Faculty of Sustainability and is a member of the Center for the Study of Democracy. He holds a doctoral degree in Environmental Law from Dr...

Agriculture and food

EU / Western Europe

Sustainability standards

Latin America

Global commodity flows between distally connected social-ecological systems pose important challenges to sustainability governance. These challenges are partly due to difficulties in designing and implementing governance institutions that fit or match the scale of the environmental and social proble...

I am currently Assistant Professor of Global Economic Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Development at the University of Oxford and affiliated with St. Anthony's C...

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

Services

Social and working conditions

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...

Stefan Pahl is Associate Expert for UNIDO, while also holds an Associate Fellow position at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). His research focusses on the role of global value chains for economic development through job creation, productivity growth and structural change. Stef...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Services

South Asia

Environment and climate change

The Middle East and North Africa

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Latin America

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...

Asmita Parshotam is an admitted attorney, currently working as an international trade and development expert. She is a well-recognised author and is widely published in peer-revised journals. She also has an extensive media engagement history, including interviews with the BBC, SABC, eNCA, CNBC Afri...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

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...

Carlo Pietrobelli is a professor and policy advisor with over 30 years of experience on innovation and industrial development and policy. He is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Roma Tre, Italy, Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT, Maastricht, and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown Uni...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

The Middle East and North Africa

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Energy

Sustainability standards

Regions

Latin America

Eastern/Non-EU Europe and Central Asia

North America

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...

Stefano Ponte is a Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the Centre for Business and Development Studies at Copenhagen Business School. His research focuses on governance dynamics, and economic and environmental upgrading trajectories in global value chains — especially in d...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Energy

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Uncategorized

Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) are transnational governance instruments that can be leveraged to pursue sustainable development in global value chains. They have proliferated since the 1990s in terms of their number and the share of global production they govern. This paper shares some key...

Dr. Annalisa Primi is currently the Head of Economic Transformation and Development Division at the OECD, where she leads the OECD Policy Dialogue Initiative on GVCs, Production Transformation and Development. Before, she was the Senior Economist and Head of Structural Polices and Innovation Unit at...

Trade and FDI

Social and working conditions

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...

Matin Qaim is a food systems economist and Director at the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn. Before joining ZEF in 2021, he was Professor of International Food Economics and Rural Development at the University of Göttingen (2007-2021), Professor of International Agricultura...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

East Asia and Pacific

Social and working conditions

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...

Roberta Rabellotti is Full Professor of Economics at the Università di Pavia, Italy. She has got a Master of Science in Development Economics at the University of Oxford and a Doctor of Philosophy at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She specializes in the analysis of the ...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Services

East Asia and Pacific

Environment and climate change

EU / Western Europe

Energy

Sustainability standards

North America

Samira was an elected Member of the European Parliament from 2019 to 2024. In this role, she was the standing rapporteur for the EU's Forced Labour Regulation, and the rapporteur for the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) in the Employment and Social Affairs Committee. She was ...

Gale Raj-Reichert is Professor of Politics at Bard College Berlin and Visiting Researcher at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB) in the research group 'Globalization, Labour, and Production.' Before, Gale was a Research Fellow at the WZB and the Principal Investigator of the DFG funded project ‘...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Energy

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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 ...

Werner Raza is Director of ÖFSE – The Austrian Foundation for Development Research. An economist focusing his research on International Trade and Development, he has lectured at several universities and colleges in Austria and abroad. In addition, Mr. Raza has been a member of various advisory co...

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

Environment and climate change

The Middle East and North Africa

EU / Western Europe

Energy

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Tom Reardon is a Professor at the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics. He holds masters degrees from the Université de Nice and from Columbia University. He got his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. Tom’s research focus is on the links between inter...

Agriculture and food

Sub-saharan Africa

South Asia

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Larissa holds a PhD and a master’s degree in Energy by the University of Sao Paulo (USP) and a bachelor’s in International Relations by Faculdades Belas Artes. She acted as the coordinator of Research and Investigations at Greenpeace Brazil, as well as a Climate and Energy campaigner. She has so...

Mining

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Latin America

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...

Bettina Rudloff is an agricultural engineer and holds a PhD in agricultural economics. She started her research work on trade, agriculture and development at the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA), Maastricht, the Netherlands. During that time, she led mid-term vocational training pr...

Tekalign Gutu Sakketa is a Researcher Economist at the German Institute of Development and Suatainability (IDOS) and Senior Fellow at the Center for Development Research (ZEF) of Bonn University. He is also the 2021 Structural Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Spaces (STAARS) fellow a...

Sub-saharan Africa

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...

Christina Saulich is Consultant at the Federal Ministry for Economic Coorperation and Development (BMZ). Previously, she worked at the German Institute for International and Security Affais (SWP) in the project Transnational Governance of Sustainable Commodity Supply Chains. She received her M.A. de...

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

East Asia and Pacific

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Latin America

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...

Saweda Liverpool-Tasie is a tenured associate professor in the department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics. She received her PhD in Agriculture and Consumer Economics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds an MSc in Urban and Regional Planning and an MA in Third Wo...

Agriculture and food

Sub-saharan Africa

South Asia

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Christoph Scherrer is a professor for "Globalization & Politics" at the University of Kassel since 2000. Christoph received his doctorate with a thesis on the U.S. auto and steel industries and his habilitation in 1999 on the enforcement of liberal foreign economic policies in the United States. He ...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

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 ...

Janpeter Schilling is Professor for Risk- Crisis- and Conflictmanagement at the HWR Berlin. Previously, he worked Junior Professor for Landuse Conflicts, Head of the Research Group Landuse Conflicts at the Institute for Environmental Sciences, and Scientific Director of the Peace Academy Rhineland-P...

Sub-saharan Africa

Environment and climate change

The Middle East and North Africa

Social and working conditions

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Latin America

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...

Almut Schilling-Vacaflor holds the Chair of International Business, Society and Sustainability at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her research focuses on sustainability governance, business and human rights, global supply chains, environmental justice and resource extraction as we...

Agriculture and food

Services

Environment and climate change

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Latin America

Environmental governance is increasingly challenged by global flows, which connect distant places through trade, investment and movement of people. To date, research on this topic has been dispersed across multiple fields and diverse theoretical perspectives. We present the results of a systematic l...

Philip Schleifer is Associate Professor of Transnational Governance at the Political Science Department at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Prior to his appointment at the UvA, he was a Max Weber Fellow and the European University Institute and held visiting positions at Duke University and the Gr...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Latin America

Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) are transnational governance instruments that can be leveraged to pursue sustainable development in global value chains. They have proliferated since the 1990s in terms of their number and the share of global production they govern. This paper shares some key...

Svenja Schöneich is a policy advisor for resource policies, raw material supply chains and corporate responsibility at Germanwatch. Previously, she worked as an associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) on the project "Transnational Governance of Sustainable Com...

Agriculture and food

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

East Asia and Pacific

Environment and climate change

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Latin America

Prof. Dr. Elke Schüßler is a Professor of Business Administration, in particular Entrepreneurship and Organization Studies, at Leuphana University Lüneburg. From 2016 to 2023, she was Professor of Business Administration and Head of the Institute of Organization Science at Johannes Kepler Univers...

South Asia

Social and working conditions

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

To what extent are multinational corporations able to address societal challenges through voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Based on an in-depth qualitative study of how apparel multinational corporations have addressed labor standards violations since the deadly 2013 Rana Plaza facto...

Julia Schwarzkopf is a Professor for Sustainability Management at the HTW Berlin Business School. After various positions in science and business, she received her doctorate from the ETH Zurich on corporate climate strategies. Subsequently, the sociologist and environmental scientist worked in the f...

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Kunal Sen is a leading international expert on the political economy of growth and development with over three decades of experience in academic and applied development economics research. Since 2019 he is the Director of UNU-WIDER. He is also a professor of development economics at the Global Devel...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

South Asia

Social and working conditions

Uncategorized

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...

Adnan Serič is heading the Innovation Lab of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). He is also project manager of UNIDO Industrial Analytics Platform (iap.unido.org), UNIDO focal point for the T20 and the annual Forum on Globalization and Industrialization. He previously w...

Standard

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Stefan Seuring is full professor of supply chain management at the University of Kassel. He holds a PhD and Habilitation in business administration from the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. His research covers the intersection of supply chain management and sustainability. He was...

Trade and FDI

Services

Social and working conditions

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Uncategorized

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...

I combine a policy background with strong quantitative skills to provide policy-relevant research on the full range of trade and development issues. I have worked extensively with major international organizations such as the World Bank, OECD, Asian Development Bank, UNESCAP, APEC, and FAO. I have p...

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

Services

East Asia and Pacific

Social and working conditions

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...

Samuel Siewers is a researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and a PhD candidate at the Chair of Development Economics at the University of Göttingen. He holds a Master's degree in economics from Heidelberg University and a BA, also in economics, from the Federal Univer...

Agriculture and food

Environment and climate change

The Middle East and North Africa

Eastern/Non-EU Europe and Central Asia

Building upon the argument that factor endowments influence distributional outcomes, this paper examines the consequences of the China shock to global food markets for economic inequality in Brazilian municipalities from 1985 to 2020. I propose a new identification strategy that exploits plausibly e...

Andreas Stamm is an economic geographer and holds a PhD from Marburg University. After his PhD and following five years of working at the National University of Costa Rica and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) he joined IDOS in 1998. His work covers aspects of value chain development and sustainabi...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Latin America

Cornelia Staritz is Tenure Track Professor in Development Economics at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna. She is also member of the Advisory Board of the Austrian Foundation for Development Research (ÖFSE) and Research Associate at the Policy Research on Internationa...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

The Middle East and North Africa

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Energy

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Latin America

Eastern/Non-EU Europe and Central Asia

North America

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...

Frauke Steglich is a Researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), Managing Director of the Poverty Reduction, Equity and Growth Network (PEGNet) at IfW, and Research Fellow at the Kiel Centre for Globalization (KCG). Her research interests lie in the field of empirical international...

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...

Victor Stolzenburg is research economist at the World Trade Organization (WTO), where he works on a wide range of topics relating to international trade and global value chains. His recent work engages with topics of gender equality and the effects of COVID-19, and he investigates more broadly the d...

Trade and FDI

Social and working conditions

Uncategorized

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 ...

Tevin Tafese is a research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). His research and policy work explores the effects of globalisation and digitalisation on developing countries. A particular focus of his work is on Africa, where has worked on several projects on global val...

Vietnam's deep integration into GVCs has been driven by the establishment of special economic zones (SEZs). This paper examines the local labour market impacts of this SEZ programme. We trace the built-up area of SEZs over time to construct a novel continuous measure of SEZ exposure using histo...

Daria Taglioni is Research Manager in the Development Research Group at the World Bank and has recently been Team-Task Lead for the World Development Report 2020 on global value chains. Previously, she worked as Senior Economist at the European Central Bank (ECB) and as Economist at the Organisation...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

The Middle East and North Africa

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Energy

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Latin America

Global value chains (GVCs) powered the surge of international trade after 1990 and now account for almost half of all trade. This shift enabled an unprecedented economic convergence: poor countries grew rapidly and began to catch up with richer countries. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, howe...

Rainer Thiele is director of the Kiel Africa Initiative and the Poverty Reduction, Equity and Growth Network (PEGNet) at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and adjunct professor at Kiel University. His current research focusses on the allocation and effectiveness of foreign aid an on issues re...

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...

Marcel Timmer is Deputy-Director of the CPB Netherlands Bureau for of Economic Policy Analysis and professor of economic growth and development at the Groningen Growth and Development Centre at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has recently led the research program ‘Modelling Global...

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...

David Tschirley is fixed-term professor of International Development in the Department of Food, Agricultural, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University, and Co-Director of the department’s Food Security Group. He is also a member of the Core Technical Team of MSU’s Global Center for Fo...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Sub-saharan Africa

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

Latin America

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 consume...

Ari Van Assche is Professor of International Business at HEC Montréal, deputy editor of the Journal of International Business Policy, and co-founder of the International Institute of Economic Diplomacy. His research focuses on the organization of global value chains and their implications for inter...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Services

East Asia and Pacific

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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 & Assembl...

Jo Van Biesebroeck is professor of economics at KU Leuven, Belgium, and Research Fellow at Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London, UK. His research interests are in international trade, industrial organization and economic development, and he has substantially contributed to the study of...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

East Asia and Pacific

The Middle East and North Africa

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...

Zhi Wang is a research professor of Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, as well as professor and founding director of Research Center of Global Value Chains at University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) in Beijing. His research interests are in internatio...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

East Asia and Pacific

Environment and climate change

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...

Daniel Weiß is Principal at AFRY, a European leader in engineering, design, and advisory services, accelerating the transition towards a sustainable society. Previously, he was the Head of Programme Green Economy at adelphi, a public policy consultancy based in Berlin. He completed a Master’s Deg...

Trade and FDI

Environment and climate change

Social and working conditions

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Lindsay Whitfield is Professor of Business and Development at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. She is also Co-Director at the Centre for Business and Development Studies. She holds a B.A. in Politics and a B.A. in Economics from the Univer...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

East Asia and Pacific

Social and working conditions

Energy

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...

Christine Wieck is professor for agricultural and food policy at the University of Hohenheim. Her research, teaching and outreach centers on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of agricultural and food policies in a globalized world with a special focus on the sustainable transformation (green...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Environment and climate change

EU / Western Europe

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Henning Wilts is the Director of Division Circular Economy at the Wuppertal Institute. He studied economics with focus on European political science, economic policy, and fiscal law at the University of Cologne and holds a PhD from the Technical University of Darmstadt. His research focus is on tran...

Agriculture and food

Environment and climate change

EU / Western Europe

Sustainability standards

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....

Deborah Winkler is a Senior Economist in the World Bank Group’s Trade Unit of the Economic Policy Department. Deborah has worked on issues of global value chains, offshoring, export competitiveness, foreign direct investment, and trade in services; their determinants; and their economic and socia...

Agriculture and food

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Sub-saharan Africa

Mining

East Asia and Pacific

South Asia

Environment and climate change

The Middle East and North Africa

EU / Western Europe

Social and working conditions

Energy

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

Latin America

Eastern/Non-EU Europe and Central Asia

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...

Joseph (Joe) Wozniak is the director of the Trade for Sustainable Development (T4SD) Programme at the International Trade Centre, Geneva, Switzerland. Joe has over 12 years of experience in sustainable development in the public and private sectors. He holds a Master's Degree in International Relati...

Environment and climate change

Sustainability standards

Corporate responsibility and lead firms

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...

Cuihong Yang is professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where she also obtained her PhD. Her main research areas are input-output analysis, economic forecasting and global value chains. She was vice president of the International Input-Output Association(2013-2018) and is the executive vice pr...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

Services

East Asia and Pacific

Environment and climate change

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 ...

Miaojie Yu is a Boya Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Peking University in Beijing China where he also holds the position of a Secretary of the Party Committee and Deputy Dean of the National Development Research Institute. He has won different national and international award such as the...

Trade and FDI

Manufacturing

East Asia and Pacific

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 expo...

Chahir Zaki is a chaired professor of economics at the University of Orléans and a research fellow at Laboratoire d’Economie d’Orléans where he is the chairholder of the Chair in Environmental and Mineral Economics. Chahir is also a lead economist (part-time) at the Economic Research Forum, a ...

Efficient institutions matter in promoting Global Value Chains (GVCs) participation since they help reduce transaction costs for firms that engage in trade. Competition policy is considered an important dimension of these institutions. This paper investigates whether competition policy matters for p...

Yuan Zi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Oslo, a senior researcher at University of Zurich and a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). Her research interests include international trade, economic geography and economic ...

Trade and FDI

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...