Global value chain (GVC) analysis examines the distribution of value between lead firms and suppliers but overlooks profit leakage to actors outside GVCs, especially financial markets. We address this gap by integrating GVC analysis with the corporate financialization literature, examining value capture between shareholders, lead firms, and suppliers. Using S&P Capital IQ data, we analyze lead firms' financialization of objectives, investments, operations, and value capture across four GVCs (apparel, automotive, copper, and coffee/cocoa) from 1993 to 2022. We show that GVCs serve lead firms as a "source of value" by lowering sourcing costs to increase profit margins and shareholder returns, and as a "source of liquidity," extending supplier payment terms that enhance working capital. Overall, shareholders emerge as the main beneficiaries of GVCs. While issuing equity plays a minor role in financing lead firms, these firms sustain stock markets through large shareholder payouts, funded through the profits generated in GVCs.

The world faces multiple crises and disruptions, such as climate impacts, pandemics, geopolitical tension and competition, conflicts, and wars. Socio-metabolic research (SMR), the study of stocks and flows of materials and energy associated with socioeconomic activities, is not well equipped to address these challenges. SMR methods are predominantly descriptive, static or linear. They treat disruptions as exogenous and are ill-equipped to capture abrupt non-linear changes evident today and likely to intensify in the future. They lack the granularity needed to analyze how stocks and flows of resources relate to actors, institutions, and power relations characterized by vast inequalities. SMR relies primarily on quantitative data, which is often inadequate to understand qualitative system properties and mechanisms. These shortcomings hinder understanding resilience, the ability of social metabolism to recover from shocks, and malleability, the extent to which social metabolism can be transformed to promote sustainable wellbeing for all. SMR can respond through linkages with big data models treating economies as complex networked systems that allow analyzing system resilience, non-linearities, feedback mechanisms, and tipping points. Enhanced granularity in terms of higher resolution quantitative data and rigorous understanding of qualitative system properties can help connect actors' decision-making with their biophysical implications. This is a prerequisite for generating transformative knowledge through SMR. Linking complexity science, political ecology, and SMR is imperative for addressing pressing contemporary issues.

This article examines how disruptions in global production networks (GPNs) reshape lead firm strategies and the geographies of production. We adapt the GPN 2.0 framework by incorporating three mediating factors on lead firm strategy-supplier investment case, path dependencies, and state action. Focusing on textile and apparel GPNs, we find: (1) since the mid-2010s, lead firm strategies have been disrupted by increased online sales and geopolitical tensions; (2) lead firms adapted their sourcing strategies by increasing nearshoring, verticality, and 'China + 1' strategies; (3) these strategies materialized in apparel assembly, while production of inputs (fabric, fibers, accessories) remains concentrated in China.

Since 2011, the EU has included trade and sustainable development (TSD) chapters in its free trade agreements (FTAs), but research questions their effectiveness. The recent EU-Vietnam FTA (EVFTA) appears as an exception, since Vietnam, prior to ratification, committed to groundbreaking labor reforms. This article provides the first analysis of implementation and impacts of the TSD chapter in Vietnam. Building on scholarship applying a multiscalar labor regime framework to the trade-labor linkage, we argue for centering the state, which is pivotal to labor regimes and FTAs (negotiation, implementation, and enforcement) but remains underexplored in extant literature. Employing a strategic-relational approach, we show how the impact of labor provisions is shaped by contestations within, around, and between states, focusing on three sets of interfacing relations: state-society relations in partner countries. interstate relations and geopolitics, and global production network (GPN) relations that structure labor regimes in export sectors. Based on interviews and secondary data, we find that the TSD chapter has been delayed and diluted by conservatives in Vietnam, that EU pressure has made little dent, and that its articulation with GPN dynamics gives rise to mismatches regarding workers' grievances, buyers' purchasing practices, and existing modes of resistance. The article's main contribution is the proposed integration of strategic-relational state theory into a multiscalar labor regime framework for analyzing the impact of labor provisions. Such a perspective yields a less optimistic assessment of the EVFTA and highlights the contradictions of promoting labor standards through FTAs that ultimately serve to expand spaces for capital accumulation.

This article assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and geopolitics on geographies of production. Criticizing simplified perspectives on globalized versus intraregional production, we stress the multi-scalarity, the role of industrial policies and sector-specific path dependencies in shaping global production. Based on expert interviews and policy and industry documents, our analysis focuses on the automotive, clothing, and electronics industries. Although concerns for resilience increasingly shape lead firms’ strategies, increased regionalization of production through re- or near-shoring is only one of several strategies. Where it does occur, it has been driven by state policies that tackle certain strategically important products, not production networks as a whole. Hence, while recent events exposed the vulnerabilities of global production, we do not observe deglobalization in the sense of a comprehensive retreat from globalized in favor of intraregional production. Nonetheless, state interventions that are geopolitically motivated and affect firms’ investment decisions have intensified particularly in the United States and the European Union.

Research and debates around mineral extraction in the context of social-ecological transformation have to date dedicated limited attention to price-making. Drawing on the provisioning systems approach, this article assesses price-making in mineral provisioning as contested processes. We argue that price-making is not an objective or solely technical process taking place on abstract markets but rather it is, first, reflective of power struggles over specific rules and devices between different actors, embedded in social relations, network practices, and institutions and, second, linked to the materialities of commodities and the territorial and organizational forms of their provisioning. Empirically, we analyze the "electric vehicle metals" copper, cobalt, and lithium for which derivative markets are intensifying their role as price-determination institutions linked particularly to the interest of financial actors in getting price exposure. The article criticizes current shifts to benchmark- and derivative markets-based price-determination. This approach focuses on short-term demand and supply considerations without considering local producer-region production specificities, broader economic impacts, and environmental and social costs and risks. Moreover, it fails to address the long-term insecurities related to resource depletion. With financial actors dominating price-determination on derivative markets, prices deviate even from such a narrow fundamental demand and supply perspective, increasing volatility and short-termism. Alternative price-making mechanisms are needed, together with other policies for social-ecological transformation which requires political regulation embedded in democratic decision-making. Methodologically, the article is based on production, trade, and financial data and semi-structured interviews with representatives of price-determination institutions, metal-provisioning systems, and producer countries.

Current sustainability transformations render certain minerals, such as lithium, 'critical'. We argue that criti-cality is actively produced, involving demand, supply and price perceptions, policies linked to green extracti-vism, and underlying narratives around the role of commodities for sustainable development. Criticality affects, in turn, the geographical and organizational forms of as well as firm strategies in global production networks (GPNs). We highlight the impact of financial actors and interests in these processes, as they enable the expansion of lithium extraction, by assessing three channels through which financial actors impact producer strategies and GPNs - price-setting, equity and debt financing. Driven by criticality, financial actors mobilize green investment stories along the 'finance-sustainability nexus'. This enables the shifting of resource frontiers through funding new projects and creates variable price-setting regimes linked to derivative markets. Financial interests introduce an additional speculative momentum to lithium extraction, contributing to accelerating boom-bust patterns, volatility and short-termism. Methodologically, the paper draws on sector data, industry and company reports, as well as semi-structured interviews with lithium sector and financial actors specifically in London, Switzerland, Chile and Zimbabwe.

The EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) deviates from the poor track record of 'trade and sustainable development' chapters in EU FTAs. Ahead of ratification, Vietnam embarked upon pathbreaking reforms, culminating in a new labor code and accession to outstanding ILO core conventions. This article assesses the role of the EVFTA in these reforms. Building on literatures on the trade-labor nexus and externalization of EU governance, we call for a more comprehensive analysis of power dynamics in partner countries and address this lacunae by embedding FTAs and labor reforms in a strategic-relational conceptualization of states. We argue that the 'success' of the EVFTA was the outcome of specific conjunctures of social forces in, and outside of, state institutions in the EU and Vietnam, and their mediation at the transnational level. Amid free trade skepticism in the EU, particular members of the Parliament and the Council wielded their veto powers to negotiate with Vietnam and pull the Commission into a stronger position. In Vietnam, the external pressure resonated with internal struggles and empowered reformists to drive forward labor reforms. Implementation, however, remains uncertain; and, context-dependent as it was, the EVFTA pre-ratification impact does not easily lend itself to replication in other FTAs.

Zusammenfassung Die wirtschaftlichen Erschütterungen infolge der COVID-19-Pandemie scheinen die Notwendigkeit einer geografischen Restrukturierung und Rückverlagerung der Produktion zu bestärken, führten sie doch die Verwundbarkeit der globalisierten Produktionsstrukturen vor Augen. Der Beitrag geht den Auswirkungen von COVID-19 auf die Geografie globaler Produktionsnetzwerke nach. In Abgrenzung zu unterkomplexen Perspektiven auf die Globalisierung wird deren multiskalarer und politisch gestalteter Charakter hervorgehoben. Basierend auf diesen theoretischen Überlegungen und Fallstudien zur Automobil‑, Elektronik- und Bekleidungsindustrie wird gefolgert, dass die COVID-19-Pandemie nicht als Auslöser für einen allgemeinen Rückbau der globalen Fertigung interpretiert werden kann, wohl aber bereits länger anhaltende Verschiebungen hin zu multipolaren Produktions- und Konsumstrukturen verstärkt. Zwar hat das Thema der Resilienz globaler Produktionsnetzwerke eine größere Aufmerksamkeit in der strategischen Planung von Unternehmen und der Industriepolitik von Staaten erhalten. Eine verstärkte Lokalisierung und Regionalisierung von Produktionsnetzwerken ist jedoch nur eine Strategie von mehreren und wurde bis jetzt kaum implementiert. Anhaltende Störungen der Lieferketten, steigende Transportkosten und vor allem geo- und umweltpolitisch motivierte Politiken könnten aber durchaus zu einem stärkeren Re- oder Nearshoring führen. Politische Bestrebungen in diese Richtung werden jedoch limitiert durch gewachsene weltwirtschaftliche Entwicklungspfade und die mit ihnen verbundenen Kräfteverhältnisse. Im Ausblick betont der Beitrag die Notwendigkeit einer umfassenden politisch motivierten Restrukturierung globaler Produktionsnetzwerke im Kontext der dringend gebotenen sozial-ökologischen Transformation.

ABSTRACTThis article builds on critiques of the concept of social upgrading in global value chain (GVC) research, which problematize its coupling to lead firm strategies and economic upgrading by supplier firms, by reconceptualizing social upgrading through the lens of worker power. It argues that a better understanding of the causal processes of social upgrading can be obtained by integrating insights from labour geography, which situates worker agency at the intersection of a ‘vertical’ dimension of transnational relations and a ‘horizontal’ dimension of local relations, with conceptualizations of worker power from (global) labour studies, particularly the modes of structural and associational power. The authors call for a deeper theorization of the places in which GVCs ‘touch down’, arguing that worker power is decisively shaped by state–labour relations as well as the intersectionality of worker identities and interlinkages between spheres of production and reproduction. Case study analyses of the apparel sectors in Cambodia and Vietnam employ this reconceptualization, drawing on the authors’ own fieldwork. In both cases, worker power expressed in strike action was a key causal driver of social upgrading; and in both, the outcomes were conditioned by GVC dynamics as well as shifting state–labour relations and intersections of worker identities linked to gender, household and community relations.

This paper calls for integrating price-setting power and related uneven exposure to price risks into the analysis of governance in global value chains (GVCs) as it adds to other power dimensions in producing unequal distributional outcomes. This is shown for the cocoa GVC, in which—unlike in today’s mostly liberalised market structures—the world’s top cocoa-producing countries, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, pursue price stabilisation measures. These measures address intra-seasonal producer price volatility, and recent collaboration has achieved a living-income differential on top of export prices, but such measures do not shield export and producer prices from inter-seasonal variations in world prices determined on commodity derivatives markets. Based on interviews with actors along the cocoa GVC, we argue that this is related to the price-setting power of ‘grinder-traders’ and the key role of financial hedging and trading on commodity derivatives markets in their business strategies. Financialisation processes have increased derivatives trading’s complexity and short-termism, accelerating consolidation among grinder-traders and making price stabilisation more challenging. Through their price stabilisation systems, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana have maintained some price-setting power in the cocoa GVC, but largely remain ‘global price-takers’, with prices determined on derivatives markets and transmitted along the cocoa GVC through grinder-traders.

Transnational labour alliance (TLA) campaigns have been the subject of sustained scholarly inquiry for more than two decades. Nevertheless, little is known about the overall characteristics of TLA campaigns in general, in part because the full population of cases remains unknown. This article begins to fill this lacuna by introducing the Transnational Labor Alliances Database Project, an archive of primary and secondary documents and researcher-assembled case summaries created by the author over six years, with the help of over 100 undergraduate research assistants. This article explains the methodology of the project as well as several important limitations of the database in its current state. Additionally, this article provides a theoretical overview of key themes relevant to the analysis of TLAs and an empirical overview of broad trends in TLA campaigns. It makes a first step towards developing a typology of TLAs and argues that TLAs vary across at least five key dimensions: (1) who the main actors are; (2) what workers want; (3) where the campaign occurs; (4) why the TLA forms in the first place; and (5) how tactics are deployed.

Labour rights violations and poor working conditions are rife in global production networks (GPNs). Until now research on labour governance in GPNs has been dominated by private measures. We ignite discussions on the role of the state in governing labour conditions in GPNs by focusing on a less well-known public governance instrument - socially responsible public procurement (SRPP). SRPP is the inclusion of social criteria on working conditions in public procurement contracts. Revised European Union (EU) directives on public procurement widened the space to exercise SRPP including for outsourced and offshored production. Understanding how states can exercise SRPP as a labour governance instrument requires a conceptualization of state powers. We present a conceptualization of the hybrid regulator-buyer state and show that an effective SRPP approach requires both strong regulator powers, differentiated as legislative, institutional, judicial and discursive, and buyer power which depend on purchasing volumes and supplier and market characteristics.

This article asks whether and how local firms in low-income countries can participate, upgrade and capture value in apparel global value chains in the context of increased entry barriers and asymmetric power relations. It focuses on Madagascar, which is the top apparel exporter in Sub-Saharan Africa and one where there is a significant number of local firms. The article examines the capability-building processes of local firms, which are the basis for upgrading paths and broader sector development. We do this by combining conceptual insights from the Technological Capabilities literature with the conjunctural approach to Global Value Chains and Global Production Networks. Based on extensive fieldwork in Madagascar’s apparel export sector, the article explains how the relational, local and regional assets that local firms can leverage in building technological capabilities influence their choices with regards to export strategies and their upgrading paths. In turn, these assets are linked to different types of local ownership, and they emerge through historical legacies and the national socio-economic context, which give rise to specific transnational social relations, as well as through regional economic formations and global value chain dynamics.

Dieser Beitrag kritisiert das herkömmliche, in der Forschung über globale Wertschöpfungsketten (GWK) geläufige Konzept von sozialem Upgrading, da es den Zusammenhang zwischen Machtbeziehungen und Beschäftigungsbedingungen unzureichend berücksichtigt. Die Autor*innen stellen eine Neukonzeptualisierung vor, die auf einem kritischen Verständnis von Beschäftigtenmacht beruht. Beschäftigtenmacht in GWK wird auf einer vertikalen und einer horizontalen Achse bestimmt. Die erste Achse betrifft die Beziehungen innerhalb von GWK, die zweite die lokalen Kapital-Arbeit- und Staat-Gesellschaft-Beziehungen. Zudem betonen die Autor*innen die Bedeutung einer Analyse der Intersektionalität von Beschäftigtenidentitäten im Rahmen von Machtverhältnissen und bei der Machtausübung. Beschäftigtenmacht – hier als strukturelle und Assoziationsmacht betrachtet – wird am Schnittpunkt der beiden Achsen ausgeübt und ist verwoben mit den Staat-Gesellschaft-Beziehungen und multiplen Beschäftigtenidentitäten. Eine exemplarische Analyse der Bekleidungsindustrie Kambodschas zeigt, dass die Neukonzeptualisierung bei der Untersuchung sozialer Up- und Downgradingprozesse hilfreich sein kann.

Local firms in new supplier countries face major challenges in entering manufacturing global value chains (GVCs) in the context of increased competition and requirements. To understand these challenges, we argue for the importance of looking more closely at local firm capability building, which is a costly and uncertain process and in the early stage of industrialisation was historically facilitated by industrial policy and leveraging foreign knowledge. This article examines the opportunities and constraints that Ethiopian-owned firms faced in building capabilities to enter apparel GVCs, using a survey designed to measure firms' capabilities and firm histories to understand learning paths. We find that local export firms had a large capability gap between their existing capabilities and what is required to enter apparel GVCs, leading to high learning costs and risks, while the profit margins were very low, and there were limited learning channels. Industrial policy evolved taking into account these constraints, but faced challenges in providing learning channels for local firms in the context of a weak manufacturing class and hyper-competitive apparel GVCs. This resulted in a learning trap where local firms do not even try to enter manufacturing GVCs, or enter but fail to remain.

In addition to static benefits, the dynamic benefits of special economic zones (SEZs), in terms of linkages with the national economy outside the zones and technology transfer from foreign to local firms, are crucial for structural transformation. This chapter assesses the extent to which the SEZ or SEZ-like policies and related FDI attraction have led to technology transfer in the leading sub-Saharan African apparel exporters, namely Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Ethiopia. In doing so, it focuses on local firm-level learning, which underpins technology transfer, and the conditions under which it occurs. It concludes that targeted infrastructure provision of physical zones is important, but that global economy dynamics such as global buyer and foreign investor strategies as well as the complexities related to local firm technological capability building are crucial to understanding technology transfer, arguing for more strategic industrial policies around SEZs.

Economic partnership agreements (EPAs) mark a new era in economic relations between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries that will lead to reciprocal tariff liberalization. Model‐based impact assessments have become a powerful tool in trade negotiations and mixed results are reported for ACP countries. Given their set‐up within a neoclassical framework, these models neglect important issues such as impacts on employment, macroeconomic balances and adjustment costs. The structuralist computable general equilibrium model applied in this article for three African EPA regions addresses these shortcomings and shows negative macroeconomic and distributional effects and important adjustment costs associated with employment and public revenue losses. These results highlight the importance of policy responses to deliver on promises associated with EPAs, namely sustainable economic development. More generally, they show the importance of alternative models to understand implementation challenges and facilitate broader debates about bilateral trade agreements.