Joon-Kyu Lee

The rise of private food standards has brought forth an ongoing debate about whether they work as a barrier for smallholders and hinder poverty reduction in developing countries. This paper uses a global value chain approach to explain the relationship between value chain structure and agrifood safety and quality standards and to discuss the challenges and possibilities this entails for the upgrading of smallholders. It maps four potential value chain scenarios depending on the degree of concent

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the global value chain (GVC) approach to understand the relationship between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the changing patterns of global trade, investment and production, and its impact on economic and social upgrading. It aims to illuminate how GVCs can advance our understanding about MNEs and rising power (RP) firms and their impact on economic and social upgrading in fragmented and dispersed global production systems. Design/methodo

Abstract The fourth industrial revolution challenges the existing understanding of innovation and upgrading in the global economy. It blurs traditional sectoral boundaries based on distinctive products and technologies and calls into question a traditional global value chain (GVC) perspective, which, similar to the sectoral systems of innovation approach, examines innovation and upgrading from a sector-based orientation. Building upon the recent reformulation and extension of GVC governance theo

A commodity chain refers to “a network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity.” The attention given to this concept has quickly translated into an expanding body of global chains literature. Research into global commodity chains (GCC), and later global value chains (GVC), is an endeavor to explain the social and organizational structure of the global economy and its dynamics by examining the commodity chains of a specific product of service. The GCC approach f

Globalisation has challenged the way industrial development takes place. Fragmented and decentralised global production and the rapid growth of consumer markets in emerging economies demand a more sophisticated framework to analyse development paths than does the dichotomy of export orientation and import substitution. This article proposes a typology based on (a) specialisation in the global value chain and (b) market orientation to distinguish different development trajectories and then applie

Abstract This paper examines the relationship of economic and social upgrading in the global value chain (GVC) of mobile phone manufacturing. It specifically questions (1) how the GVCs of mobile phone manufacturing have changed the dynamics of trade, production and value creation and capturing in developing countries; and (2) how those dynamics have affected the social upgrading of workers in GVCs in terms of employment and wages. The paper identifies several key features of the mobile phone GVC

In developing countries, more and beffer jobs have been a key goal of economic development based on the integration of local firms and workers into global value chains (GVCs). As global production is increasingly organized by multinational lead firms through a dense web of inter-firm relationships across national boundaries, the participation of local producers in GVCs is widely considered to be an effective way to create new employment, generate incomes, and therefore reduce poverty in developi

Cultural production is increasingly fragmented and dispersed organizationally and geographically as a result of growing offshore outsourcing within and across firms, giving rise to global value chains (GVCs). Yet, a GVC perspective has been applied limitedly to the study of cultural industries without serious consideration of inter-firm governance structure and its consequences on upgrading. Building upon the GVC literature on multiple governance structure, this paper examines three GVCs in Kore