Who is at the Center of the Global Supply Chain?

We study the network structure of the global supply chain, using trade in value-added data for 67 economies and 45 industries. We find that, in the global manufacturing network, a few hub economies such as China, US, Germany, Japan, and Russia drive the global and regional trade flows, but have low dependence on foreign sourcing. Building fine-grained global networks linking economy-industry pairs, we find that the structural importance of an economy-industry pair in the global supply chain drives its contribution to global economic and stock market fluctuations. These results provide fresh evidence supporting the network origins of global economic fluctuations