The global economy: Organization, governance, and development

By Gary Gereffi. 2010

423 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The global economy has changed in significant ways during the past several decades, and these changes are rooted in how the global economy is organized and governed. These transformations affect not only the flows of goods and services across national borders, but also the implications of these processes for how countries move up (or down) in the international system. The development strategies of countries today are affected to an unprecedented degree by how industries are organized, and this is reflected in a shift in theoretical frameworks from those centered around the legacies and actors of nation-states to a greater concern with supranational institutions and transnational organizations. Policy makers, managers, workers, social activists, and many other stakeholders in developed as well as developing nations need a firm understanding of how the contemporary global economy works if they hope to improve their position in it, or forestall an impending decline. The topic of the global economy is inherently interdisciplinary. No single academic field can encompass it or afford to ignore it. Because of its vast scope, pundits who focus on the global economy are likely to be classified as academic interlopers; they run the risk of being too simplistic if they advance forceful hypotheses and too eclectic if they try to capture the full complexity of their topic. Scholars in this field thus have to master what economist Albert Hirschman has popularized as ‘the art of trespassing’ (Hirschman, 1981; Foxley et al., 1986). The global economy can be studied at different levels of analysis. At the macro level are international organizations and regimes that establish rules and norms for the global community. These include institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the International Labor Organization, as well as regional integration schemes like the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement. These regimes combine both rules and resources, and hence they establish the broadest parameters within which the global economy operates. At the meso level, the key building blocks for the global economy are countries and firms. Those scholars who take countries as their main analytical unit (as in the varieties of capitalism literature) provide an institutional perspective on the main, enduring features of national economies. The global economy is seen as the arena in which countries compete in different product markets.

Subfields: Development

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Citations in the corpus

Global Work, Surplus Labor, and the Precarious Economies of the Border (2011, background): “In newly industrializing economies in Asia and Latin America, transnational corporations accelerated outsourcing of lower-cost production globally (Dicken 2003; Gereffi 2005).”
Development Models and Industrial Upgrading in China and Mexico (2008, background): “Yet slower growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s generated renewed criticism of Latin America’s development model, a controversy that continues today (Dussel Peters, 2000; Lora et al., 2004).”
Global production networks: realizing the potential (2008, background): “The term GCC was popularized by Gereffi in a large number of publications since 1994 (see, for example, Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994; Gereffi, 2005).”
Global investments and regional development trajectories: the missing links (2016, background): “2 perspectives that capture the spread of value added creation and distribution across firm boundaries and geographical borders, such as those of global commodity chains (GCCs) and global value chains (GVCs) (see, among others, Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994; Gereffi and Kaplinsky, 2001; Gereffi, 20”
Global value chains in a post-Washington Consensus world (2014, background): “…early 2000s, the global value chain (GVC) and global production network (GPN) concepts gained popularity as ways to analyze the international expansion and geographical fragmentation of contemporary supply chains (Gereffi et al., 2001; Dicken et al., 2001; Henderson et al., 2002; Gereffi, 2005).”
Measuring success in the global economy: International trade, industrial upgrading, and business function outsourcing in global value chains (2009, background): “The analysis of GVCs identifies new actors in the global economy (e.g. global buyers and global suppliers) and shows how their emergence alters the ways that industries are organized and governed across borders (Gereffi, 2005).”
E-Commerce and Industrial Upgrading in the Chinese Apparel Value Chain (2018, background): “The GVC framework examines how a given industry is organised by analysing the structure and dynamics of diverse actors involved in global transactions, with a primary focus on the nature and content of actor linkages that span international borders (Gereffi 2005; 2014; Gibbon, Bair, and Ponte 2008).”
Gender and aquaculture value chains: A review of key issues and implications for research (2017, background): “…upgrading is the process in value chains of moving to higher value added activities, using more sophisticated or more efficient technologies and processes, increasing knowledge and skills, with the ultimate goal to increase the benefits derived from value chain participation (Gereffi, 2005).”
Upgrading in the automotive industry: firm-level evidence from Central Europe (2011, background): “, 2005), the concept of industrial upgrading refers to the ‘process by which economic actors—nations, firms and workers—move from low-value to relatively high-value activities in global production networks’ (Gereffi, 2005).”
The Global Apparel Value Chain, Trade and the Crisis: Challenges and Opportunities for Developing Countries (2010, background): “Figure A-3 reveals several important dynamics about the apparel value chain in Asia, and the GVC approach more generally (see (Gereffi, 2005): 172).”