A Quantitative Analysis of Governance Structures in the World Economy

In this article I explore a new quantitative approach for the analysis of buyer–supplier relationships in GVCs. Following the growing literatures of complex and social network analysis, I estimate the degree of hierarchicality of GVCs, taking into account the information of economic transactions between sectors in 190 countries of the world economy, gathered within the structures of the Global Multi-Regional Input-Output Tables of the EORA Database. In that way, I explore the spatiotemporal evolution of the hierarchicality of value-chains and provide a quantitative link between the buyer–supplier relationships of global industries and the categories of governance structures proposed by the respective theories. To the best of my knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to empirically map and quantify governance structures in the world economy