international production, trade and investments are increasingly organised within so-called global value chains (GVCs) where the different stages of the production process are located across different countries. Globalisation motivates companies to restructure their operations internationally through outsourcing and offshoring of activities.
Firms try to optimise their production processes by locating the various stages across different sites. The past decades have witnessed a strong trend towards the international dispersion of value chain activities such as design, production, marketing, distribution, etc.
This emergence of GVCs challenges conventional wisdom on how we look at economic globalisation and in particular, the policies that we develop around it.