Reconstructing the Global Economy – Production Chains, Knowledge Chains, & Value Chains

The convergence of the pandemic, of the military crisis in Ukraine, and China’s political tensions with the U.S. and other liberal economies, have eroded an earlier integration of global trade and investment. How has the rebalancing of local priorities with global connectivity reshaped production, knowledge, & value chains? This session welcomes both case studies and efforts at theory-building, both empirical and theoretical work on global integration or disintegration with a focus on national, regional, and global chains.

Scholars have looked mainly to supply or production chains (GPNs), global value chains (GVCs), and networks of innovation or knowledge. GVCs have drawn the widest scholarly interest and remain a central focus for tracking coupling, decoupling, and re-coupling of supply chains. The focus on innovation has evolved from knowledge transfer in earlier studies of development, to networks in “knowledge economies,” and now to a multi-dimensional analysis of policies, institutions, and actors in technological innovation. Tracking change in these three channels of connectivity sheds a powerful analytic light on emerging dimensions of a post-pandemic global economy