The past decades have witnessed a rapid globalisation of economic activity which has significantly changed the outlook of the world economy. International production, trade and investments are increasingly organised within so-called global value chains (GVCs) where the different stages in the...

World trade and production are increasingly structured around “global value chains” (GVCs). The last few years have witnessed a growing number of case studies describing at the product level how production is internationally fragmented, but there is little evidence at the aggregate level on...

The news that companies in OECD economies are increasingly bringing manufacturing activities back home has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Headline cases of a number of large multinational companies have given increased visibility to the phenomenon of reshoring in the economic...

With the emergence of global value chains (GVCs), production processes are increasingly fragmented and dispersed across different countries. Although many MNEs still exhibit an important ‘home bias’ in their global innovation activities, a growing number of firms have offshored R&D and...

Economic globalisation has given rise to two types of networks that stretch out across OECD and emerging economies. At the one side, global value chains (GVCs) can be thought of as the “material” transfers of goods and services (final as well as intermediate) across borders. At the other...

Increased robot use, fuelled by price declines and the increased dexterity of these machines, is expected to affect existing/future production technologies and the organisation of production within GVCs. In order to safeguard their competitiveness in an increasingly digitalised global economy,...

Because of their numerous and large activities across different countries, Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) are believed to be central and dominant actors in the global economy. In addition, it has been argued that the growing fragmentation of production within global value chains (GVCs) in the...