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The similarity of global value chains: A network-based measure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2018

ZHEN ZHU ,
GREG MORRISON ,
MICHELANGELO PULIGA ,
ALESSANDRO CHESSA  and
MASSIMO RICCABONI
ZHEN ZHU
Affiliation:
IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, 55100 Lucca, Italy Department of International Business and Economics, University of Greenwich, SE10 9LS London, UK (e-mail: z.zhu@gre.ac.uk)
GREG MORRISON
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, University of Houston, Houston TX 77204, USA (e-mail: gcmorris@central.uh.edu)
MICHELANGELO PULIGA
Affiliation:
IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy and Linkalab, Cagliari, Italy (e-mail: michelangelo.puliga@imtlucca.it, alessandro.chessa@imtlucca.it)
ALESSANDRO CHESSA
Affiliation:
IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy and Linkalab, Cagliari, Italy (e-mail: michelangelo.puliga@imtlucca.it, alessandro.chessa@imtlucca.it)
MASSIMO RICCABONI
Affiliation:
IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, 55100 Lucca, Italy Department of Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium (e-mail: massimo.riccaboni@imtlucca.it)
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Abstract

International trade has been increasingly organized in the form of global value chains (GVCs). In this paper, we provide a new method for comparing GVCs across countries and over time. First, we use the World Input–Output Database (WIOD) to construct both the upstream and the downstream global value networks. Second, we introduce a network-based measure of node similarity to compare the GVCs between any pair of countries for each sector and each year available in the WIOD. Our network-based similarity is a better measure for node comparison than the existing ones because it takes into account all the direct and indirect relationships between the country–sector pairs, is applicable to both directed and weighted networks with self-loops, and takes into account externally defined node attributes. As a result, our measure of similarity reveals the most intensive interactions among the GVCs across countries and over time. From 1995 to 2011, the average similarity between sectors and countries have clear increasing trends, which are temporarily interrupted by the recent economic crisis. This measure of the similarity of GVCs provides quantitative answers to important questions about dependency, sustainability, risk, and competition in the global production system.

Keywords

networksnode similarityinput–output analysisglobal value chainsvertical specializationinternational trade
Type
Research Article
Information
Network Science , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 607 - 632
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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