Handbook on Global Value Chains

Industrial Policy in the 21st Century

“…The global business revolution and the emergence of global/regional value chains since the early 1990s have been made possible by a number of technological advances (e.g., falling transportation costs, more interconnectedness via ICTs), cost‐reduction opportunities associated with offshoring of labour‐intensive manufacturing processes, and the increasing openness to trade and investments (Gereffi, , ; Milberg and Winkler, ; Nolan, ; Ponte et al., ; Storm, ). For a number of emerging economies, the expansion of transnational corporations (TNCs) and the resulting global segmentation of production tasks have provided an unprecedented opportunity for entering technology‐intensive industries and capturing value from advanced manufacturing technologies.…”

Regional worlds: from related variety in regional diversification to strategic coupling in global production networks

“…Primarily, GPN studies have been generally weaker in analysing technological shifts and innovative capabilities that remain the core tenet of EEG. Though many GPN and GVC studies have examined industrial upgrading in terms of changing value chain functions and labour skills in the host regions (for reviews, see Coe & Yeung, 2019;Kano et al, 2020;Ponte et al, 2019), very few have investigated the innovative activities of global lead firms in their home regions and their complex interrelationships with technological upgrading and knowledge accumulation in the host regions of their international partners and suppliers. If EEG studies can be (mis)characterized as mostly studying rich and innovative regions, then GPN/GVC studies seem to focus primarily on poor and laggard regions in the Global South!…”

The trouble with global production networks

“…By the late 2010s, GPN 2.0 and the broader GPN approach had become more intertwined with the much larger global value chains (GVC) literature beyond geography. Associated with sociologist Gereffi (1994Gereffi ( , 2018 and many other scholars (see reviews in Neilson et al, 2014;Ponte et al, 2019;Kano et al, 2020), this GVC literature has gained significant influence in the social sciences and major international organizations (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2013, 2020; World Bank, 2020; World Trade Organization, 2019). The broad appeal of the GPN approach in human geography might be partly explained by its analytical proximity to and yet theoretical advancement over the GVC framework focusing primarily on value chain governance and upgrading.…”