Table 5 WWZ decomposition results for African countries

To summarise, we find that anecdotal evidence on the differences between developing and developed economies’ GVC integration can be confirmed by the data once more detailed indicators are used. Setting aside primary sectors, high-income economies are typically positioned more upstream in the value chain, which can be seen from the concentration of their value added in intermediate goods exports. In addition, they also serve as markets of final demand, shown by their relatively high share of exported domestic value added returning home. Developing economies, on the other hand, tend to be positioned more downstream, as indicated by their high share of final goods exports and their relatively low values for forward linkages and returning domestic value added. These two stylised facts suggest that high-income economies use GVCs to outsource low value added downstream production stages and eventually re-import the final goods. However, when looking at the development over time, it appears that many developing economies have succeeded in moving up the value chain and that the general trend points to a more even distribution of value added across the different countries. Overall, we show that low- and middle-income countries have become an integral part of GVCs and are increasingly becoming the driver of their expansion.
Authors’ note: The views expressed therein are those of the authors only and do not necessarily represent the views of the World Trade Organization or the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
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Endnotes[1] An interactive demonstration of the R package is available here. It allows for the calculation of the detailed indicators without any advanced knowledge of statistical software.
[2] We define developing economies as low-income and lower-middle-income economies as classified by the World Bank in 1995.
[3] Note that while the average value seems small, rdv can account in certain country-sector pairs for more than 25% of their exported domestic value added (e.g. US steel).
[4] We focus in particular on the new set of developing economies in the OECD database to avoid overlap with WWZ’s discussion of China, Chinese Taipei, Indonesia, India, and South Korea.
[5] Note that we focus here only on Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica since data on Brazil and Mexico has already been available in previous databases.