Article; The role of law in global value chains: a research manifesto https://academic.oup.com/lril/article/4/1/57/2413108?login=false
Across a growing number of sectors and industries, value production is not just transnational in scope; it is organised and coordinated via global networks that link activities across as well as within firms and nations. These networks are increasingly referred to as ‘Global Value Chains’, or GVCs. The asserted causes of this phenomenon are multiple, and scholars debate which deserves designation as primary. 1 We begin from the premise that GVCs are not only the product of shifting economic conditions. They also arise as firms engage dynamically with multiple, overlapping and often conflicting local, national, regional and transnational legal regimes, soft-law normative orders and private ordering mechanisms (hereinafter collectively described as ‘law’).
This article seeks to establish the importance for both scholars and policymakers of investigating some of the complex ways in which the law shapes and is shaped by GVCs. The research agenda articulated here emerged from a series of ongoing conversations among a group of legal scholars, sociologists and political economists that first met in June 2014 under the auspices of the IGLP at Harvard University. For the most part, legal scholarship has only summarily or incidentally analysed GVCs, and similarly, GVCs scholars outside law have not made law a focal point of their theoretical or empirical analyses. We believe that placing law at the centre of the analysis of what have historically been treated as primarily ‘economic structures’ will not only enrich our understanding of the shape, nature and dynamic character of GVCs, but will also help to illuminate the complex inter-relationship between law and global political economy more broadly.
Article; Measuring Global Value Chains https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-economics-080217-053600
Recent decades have seen the emergence of global value chains (GVCs), in which production stages for individual goods are broken apart and scattered across countries. Stimulated by these developments, there has been rapid progress in data and methods for measuring GVC linkages. The macro ap- proach to measuring GVCs connects national input–output tables across borders by using bilateral trade data to construct global input–output tables. These tables have been applied to measure trade in value added, the length of and location of producers in GVCs, and price linkages across countries. The micro approach uses firm-level data to document firms’ input sourcing decisions, how import and export participation are linked, and how multi- national firms organize their production networks. In this review, I evaluate progress in these two approaches, highlighting points of contact between them and areas that demand further work. I argue that further convergence between these approaches can strengthen both, yielding a more complete empirical portrait of GVCs.
Article; The governance of global value chains https://rrojasdatabank.info/sturgeon2005.pdf
This article builds a theoretical framework to help explain governance pat- terns in global value chains. It draws on three streams of literature – trans- action costs economics, production networks, and technological capability and firm-level learning – to identify three variables that play a large role in determining how global value chains are governed and change. These are: (1) the complexity of transactions, (2) the ability to codify transactions, and (3) the capabilities in the supply-base. The theory generates five types of global value chain governance – hierarchy, captive, relational, modular, and market – which range from high to low levels of explicit coordination and power asymmetry. The article highlights the dynamic and overlapping nature of global value chain governance through four brief industry case studies: bicycles, apparel, horticulture and electronics.
Article; Entangled chains of global value and wealth https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2023.2220268?src=recsys
n recent decades multinational enterprises have developed ways to reorganize production and trade through Global Value Chains (GVCs), and to manage assets and liabilities through Global Wealth Chains (GWCs). This co-evolution has permitted the hyper-extraction of labor and natural resources through financial and legal technologies, entangling value creation and wealth accumulation. While scholars have separately acknowledged the role that GVCs and GWCs play in generating distributional outcomes, entanglements of production, trade, finance, and law are now so extensive that we need a sharper analytical lens to understand their interrelations. In pursuit of such a lens, we propose a research agenda focused on chain entanglements. We argue that GVCs and GWCs are not governed by firms as separate or even sequenced processes, but rather that value creation and wealth accumulation strategies are imbricated in ways that merit careful study. We develop a framework for analyzing entangled chains based on two dimensions: 1) the relative importance of intangible versus tangible assets; and 2) the orientation of firm strategy towards value creation or wealth accumulation activities.