ABSTRACT
In 2013, the United Nations for the first time dedicated its “World Investment Report” to Global Value Chains (GVCs). As recent fast growth of global trade had been driven increasingly by trade in semi-finished goods, the report illustrated that an incremental share of global trade resulted from a global disintegration of production processes organized by large transnational corporations, which operated as managers of GVCs. A total of 80 percent of global trade – so the spectacular figure of the report claims – were transfers of intermediates within GVCs. Since these goods moved back and forth between the different national affiliations of one and the same multinational enterprise (MNE) or its subcontractors, GVC-related trade also led to substantial double-counting in trade statistics, which was estimated as 28 percent of the total (UNCTAD 2013: X). Thus, as the trade specialist Robert Feenstra (1998) suggested in a seminal article, the significant integration of world markets by trade, globalization, is in part an effect and mirror-image of the “disintegration of production.”
