The Politics of Global Value Chains: The Globalization of Production and the Challenge of Governance

The globalization of trade, production, and distribution systems stands out as one of the most important developments in the contemporary international economy. The Global Value Chains (GVCs) framework has emerged in recent years as a promising conceptual tool around which systematic thinking on these phenomena can be developed. Despite important contributions by economists, our understanding of the political economy of GVCs remains far from comprehensive. In particular, the “political” side of the story has received surprisingly little attention in the extant literature. Our workshop aims to fill this gap by seeking contributions from different theoretical, conceptual, and methodological angles that address one of the following broad areas in the study of the politics of GVCs: (1) collective action, interest representation and patterns of state-society interactions; (2) implications for global governance; (3) domestic regulatory politics and varieties of capitalism, and (4) international relations and power politics.